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“We are all
in the gutter
but some of us
are looking at
the stars. ”

— OSCAR WILDE

WHY HOPE?

THE STAND
AGAINST
CIVILIZATION

JOHN ZERZAN

INTRODUCTION BY LANG GORE

WHY

HOPE?

THE STAND

AG A$£g|

CIVILIZATION

r v* .

JOHN ZERZAN

INTRODUCTION BY LANG GORE

Why Hope?

The Stand Against Civilization
Published in 20 1 5

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124
Port Townsend WA 98368
www.FeralHouse.com
Book design by D. Collins

109 876 5 432

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

THE ABSENT AGE, BY LANG GORE

Part I: Origins

PREFACE

IN THE BEGINNING
NUMB AND NUMBER

ORIGINS OF THE ONE PERCENT: THE BRONZE AGE
ARRIVEDERCI ROMA: THE CRISIS OF LATE ANTIQUITY
INDUSTRIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS:

THE LUDDITES AND THEIR INHERITORS

Part II: Situations

PREFACE
NEXT WHAT?

BLOWN AWAY: GUNS AND "RANDOM" MASS SHOOTINGS
VAGARIES OF THE LEFT
FASTER! THE AGE OF ACCELERATION
A WORD ON CIVILIZATION AND COLLAPSE

109

119

128

Part III: Inspirations

PREFACE

ANIMAL DREAMS
LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SEA

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HEALTHY?

134

WHY HOPE?

INTRODUCTION

The Absent Age

THINKING ABOUT AN UNTHINKABLE REBELLION

I n 1846 S 0 ren Kierkegaard essentially anticipated the salient fea-
ture of the postmodern age — where reality is always screened
and the defining activities are Sitting and Watching — in an essay
titled The Present Age. He noted:

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of adver-
tisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is imme-
diate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all
things, the most unthinkable.

How much more unthinkable must rebellion be in an absent age,
where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”
(Debord). Where domination assumes “a labyrinthine form without a
centre,” to borrow the description of Gothic novel Melmoth the Wan-
derer, must any prospect of revolt be absent as well?

If so, our humiliation is complete. Michael Bakunin’s keenest insight
was this:

“Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the
essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in
history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion.”

Some of us know we are animals, all of us imagine we think, many
of us would like to be in revolt. Yet who can abide the endless publicity
surrounding revolt? And who can abide the endless, alas!, deference to
Karl Marx, who more than anyone has dominated the publicity sur-
rounding revolt?

Someone has said that history is made by those with a sense of

style. Marx emerged from the First International ascendant over Ba-
kunin thanks in part to the profound influence Shakespeare had on his
style. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he quotes Timon of
Athens, Act IV, Scene 3, and remarks:

“Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular: (1) It
is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural
qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of
things; it brings together impossibilities; (2) It is the universal whore,
the universal pimp of men and peoples.”

Shakespeare indeed offers a key to anyone wishing to under-
stand “the universal confusion and inversion of things.” No
matter what any line of Shakespeare may be about, it is at the
same time almost always about something else. Marx recog-
nized the utility of such a style in confronting a world that
seems to be one thing, but almost always is something else.

Everyone knows Marx seemed to be about revolution, but wound
up being all about something else, right? Roberto Calasso put it suc-
cinctly in The Ruin ofKasch:

“Marx is a prisoner of the Enemy he attacks; his adversary’s body falls
on him and smothers him. Marx has the definitive vision of the ma-
chine for demolishing limits, which he calls capitalism, yet he questions
not the limit but the machine. He wants to design a better machine,
which will demolish limits without ever jamming, without crises. Like
a great mechanic, he has a loving, passionate knowledge of the capital-
ist machine. Concerning the limit, he shares that machine’s illusions.
What offended him was not so much and not only the iniquity which
capital engendered, but the fact that capital was preparing to become
an obstacle to production, an antiquated and sclerotic form compared
with the immensity of what was possible. Nobody has ever dreamed the
dream of capital with as much faith as Marx was able to muster in his
spirit. He was like a young man from the provinces who takes seriously,
with despairing gravity, the customs of the metropolis — that is how
Marx viewed capital.”

WHY HOPE?

The sophistication with which Marx depicts the infinite fluidity of cap-
ital has obscured, however, a very unsophisticated truth: capital is plunder,
and not only engenders iniquity, but was indeed engendered by iniquity.

The resources extracted from the worlds forced open by Europeans in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were of such astonishing volume that
feudal society exploded from within. That made possible the more clever
and dynamic system of extraction and exploitation which obtains currently.

Clever, because it emphasizes how different the industrial world of to-
day is from the agricultural world of yesterday, not to mention the gatherer-
hunter world of the years before yesterday. The good conscience of capital is
that the Conquest was not carried out by capitalists. But the bad conscience
of civilization is that the men who carried out the Conquest were civilized.

Just like many today, they believed in patriarchy, property, and
authority. And like other civilized Europeans before them such as the
Greeks and Romans, they believed in chattel slavery; their successors
used it for centuries to eventually create societies so fabulously wealthy
they now find workers as well as slaves superfluous. Mohawk Nation
News recently estimated around 80% of the world’s popidation has been
rendered redundant by the global commodity production system.

In a world where we are all on the margins, John Zerzan has nothing
but contempt for anything but a marginal life.

For several decades now, John has been at the cutting edge of contes-
tation with authority. He undermines our conditioning by identifying
it merely as the replication of domestication — thereby making it more
hateful. He relentlessly unravels all the strands woven together so cun-
ningly to contain any attempt to break out of lines laid down well before
capitalists came along.

The present collection of essays continues the overarching thrust of
John’s scholarship, unveiling the post-apocalyptic nature of our times
by noting the apocalypse was yesterday, several thousand years ago, to
be precise, and that nothing produced by civilization can ever redeem
the systematic attempt it has undertaken these (very) few millennia to
destroy or alienate any human connection with the Earth.

In fact, when civilized Europeans imposed themselves everywhere
on Earth, they created a terminal crisis for themselves by their very
contact with indigenous societies.

XI.

Suddenly, those with eyes to see and ears to hear could recognize
that patriarchy, property and authority, and certainly slavery, were nei-
ther necessary nor desirable, let alone determined by “human nature.”
Early New England colonist Cotton Mather worried that the proximity
of gatherers and hunters would prove fatally alluring to many in the new
colonies, given the evident ease and richness of their life compared to the
constant toil required of farmers, let alone servants.

The crisis continues — the allure (for better or worse) has only
deepened with the developments of recent decades, all of which es-
tablish unmistakably that the true nature of civilization is regress, not
progress. As a character says in Christopher Isherwood’s Frankenstein:
The True Story, “The process is reversing itself.” All that ever changes,
really, is the rate of acceleration of the reversion, always and ever faster,
as John reminds us in the essay included here titled “Faster.”

So what else is new'i This was clearly recognized in the so-called East
by the Taoists, who saw domestication as debasement, most tellingly in
Chuang Tzu’s chapter titled “Horses’ Hooves”:

“The potter said, ‘I know how to use clay, how to mold it into rounds
like the compass and into squares as though I had used a T-square.’ The
carpenter said, ‘I know how to use wood: to make it bend, I use the tem-
plate; to make it straight, I use the plumb line.’ However, is it really the
innate nature of clay and wood to be molded by compass and T-square,
template and plumb line? It is true, nevertheless, that generation after
generation has said, To Lo [the first horse breaker] is good at control-
ling horses, and indeed the potter and carpenter are good with clay and
wood.’ And the same nonsense is spouted by those who rule the world.”

Thomas Merton’s translation of another chapter’s title from the
same book makes a parallel point all by itself: “When Life Was Full
There Was No History.”

A similar attitude among Cynics emerged in the so-called West
about the same time: “Consider the beasts yonder and the birds, how
much freer from trouble they live than men, and they are, and how each
of them lives the longest life possible, although they have neither hands
nor human intelligence. And yet, to counter-balance these and their oth-

XII.

WHY HOPE?

er limitations, they have one very great blessing — they own no property,”
as Dio Chrysostom put it, in words evoking and also transcending the
well-known phrases of the Sermon on the Mount.

Thinking about rebellion leads invariably to considerations of meth-
od. How John does what he does — surveying the endless emptiness of “a
labyrinthine form without a centre” — deserves a brief discussion.

In The Present Age Kierkegaard noted:

“From now on the great man, the leader (according to his position) will
be without authority because he will have . . . understood the diabolical
principle of the leveling process; he will be unrecognizable; he will keep
his distinction hidden like a plain-clothes policeman , and his support will
only be negative, i.e., repelling people, whereas the infinite indijference of
abstraction judges every individual and examines him in his isolation .”
This order is dialectically the very opposite of that of the Prophets and
Judges, and just as the danger for them lay in their authority not being
recognized so nowadays the unrecognizable is in danger of being recog-
nized, and of being persuaded to accept recognition and importance as
an authority, which could only hinder the highest development.

An important contribution to John’s “unrecognizability” is his
choice of weapon. The bibliographic essay is perfect for preserving a qual-
ity of indigestibility, as it resists betraying a sense of style. Yet its style is
apt indeed if one desires to undermine any accretion of authorial author-
ity. It seems to defer endlessly to others, citing always an outside source
for whatever is asserted.

Yet this is precisely, if only partly, why John speaks with authority,
unlike the attorneys and academics. If it’s magic, one might say about
John’s essays, as the late Roberto Bolano said about Castellanos Moya’s
books, the magic is in the “will to style.” It’s both paradoxical and per-
fectly appropriate that John’s writings should have such authority given
the unassuming quality of his personal style.

Is history made by those with a sense of style? The real question is,
can it be unmade by those without a sense of style?

“By combining subjectivity and objectivity, one is able to reach the
state of nothingness. It is a battle against oneself,” says a character in
the long-running Japanese samurai TV show, Lone Wolf and Cub. The
same combination is necessary, of course, to realize the nothingness of
the State. But how?

xiii.

As a transcriptionist, I typed up medical chart notes in the SOAP
format with four headings: Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan.
Under the first, the patient describes how they’re feeling; under the sec-
ond, the physician records what they’re seeing; under the third, possible
diagnoses are noted, and under the fourth, steps to be taken are listed.

John never ignores the subjective dimensions of current alienation,
even while objectively tracing the reach and extent of that alienation.
Here “Animal Dreams” in particular deepens a feeling of animal kinship
by objectively presenting the best evidence of animal intelligence.

Yet most importantly, John provides an assessment. Early on it was
recognized that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Prov. 29: 18)

The best assessments are simplest. John’s assessment, it seems to
me, is simply this: civilization is of no interest, ultimately.

The best plans, too, are simple. John’s dismissal of civilization makes
it that much easier not to dismiss traditional indigenous resistance. Can
there be a better plan than putting First Peoples first?

Can there be a better plan than seeing the world in front of our faces?

If rebellion is to be something more than mythical, perhaps it will real-
ize itself through myth. In the myth of the Trojan War, the goddesses of
Power, Wisdom and Pleasure dispute who is most beautiful.

Eventually Paris, a herdsman known for his scrupulously fair judg-
ments, is asked to choose. He chooses the goddess of Pleasure, and
thus sets in motion the events leading to the Trojan War. His choice of
Pleasure brings him the displeasure of the other goddesses, who forever
after hate him, but never is he abandoned by his goddess:

“Aphrodite, who loves all smiling lips and eyes,
cleaves to her man to ward off peril from him.

He thought he faced death, but she saved him.”

The Iliad, Book IV, Lines 9—11

This myth suggests each of us can choose inspiration from Power, Wis-
dom, or Pleasure, and that no matter what we choose, we can’t have it all.
Yet where within contemporary society is there anything remotely resem-
bling Power, Wisdom or Pleasure?

If we find these, it will only be through supporting traditional indig-
enous resistance. Traditional indigenous people are still here; traditional

XIV.

WHY HOPE?

indigenous people are still connected to the Earth. Civilized people have
made that connection tenuous but have never broken it and never will.

For non-indigenous people, the critical issue was defined as constancy
by Jonathan Kozol in his bleak and unsparing assessment of why the up-
risings in the 1960s failed. In The Night is Dark and I Am Far from
Home, he wondered what loyalties cotdd be constructed on a groundwork
of desertion:

“There is, for each of us, the need to learn and grow, to voyage and ex-
plore, above all in the terms of our own consciousness of what “school”
is about. [Kozol was an educator.] There is, however, a much deeper
need to find one solid core of concrete action and specific dedication,
in just one neighborhood, or in one city, with one group of children
and one group of allies and one set of loyalties, and with one deep, deep
dream of love and transformation.”

This is what John has found, and for decades, and many of us
around the world are as grateful for his steadfastness as we are for his
clarity. Both are unfailing.

Clarity is hardly adequate in undoing our conditioning, but such
re-wilding, if you will, can hardly hope to get very far without clarity.
John has made abundantly clear how little can be expected from projects
which do not explicitly reject domestication and civilization. That in it-
self clears the way for what might constitute a threat to the relations of
unreality that have really enslaved us for far too long.

Lang Gore

Author of Hunting Seasons

XV.

WHY

HOPE? £

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PART I: ORIGINS

These offerings range from remote, even abstract, origins to a more recent
historical case study. Looking at the roots of our present condition is salutary,
as I see it, even required. Some argue that any focus on prehistory or history
only detracts from one’s radical subjectivity-supposedly the world’s only true
source of resistance in itself. In my opinion, those who fail to examine origins
cut themselves off from grasping how our captivity arrived, how it works, and

what alternatives have existed.

In the Beginning

A LINGERING SENSE OF ORIGIN continues to
lay claim to our hearts and minds. It beckons because
we have been exiled from something. Odysseus seeks
a return in his Odyssey and in fact there may be no
older figure in Western civilization than the wanderer,
the pilgrim, the voyager in search of a homecoming.
“Where are we going?” asked Novalis, and answered: “Always home.” 1
We are certainly stranded today, more and more so. The perfecting
of communication technology, for example, finds us ever more cut off
and lonely. Schelling, who like Novalis wrote some two hundred years
ago, is helpful here: “. . .each era has always obscured its predecessor, so
that it hardly betrays any sign of an origin... the work of thousands of
years must be stripped away to come at last to the foundation, to the
ground.” 2 Although Progress has carried us far from Origin, it has not
disappeared. Cezanne wanted to grasp “nature in its origin”; 3 the task
of the artist is “to lend duration to genesis [origin].” 4 Unfashionable now
perhaps, but as Edward Shils notes, “Some preoccupation with ‘origin’
is found in almost all human societies.” 5

Origin speaks to us of our goal or destination. Karl Kraus, bluntly:
“The origin is the goal.” 6 Without interest in it, without a conception of what
is involved, there is less of a sense of possible arrival. Origin can help liberate
the future insofar as it retrieves our relation to what has come before.

What is it of which we speak? Is it some kind of Big Bang? Fichte
wondered whether or not there is “an absolute origin, starting from
which and beyond which it is impossible to go further .” 7 Event is a pop-
ular buzzword in some philosophical circles today. Is origin, at base,
a kind of “Event”? Or more of a state of being, a primordial condi-
tion (particle or wave)? Rousseau stressed an aboriginal state of nature,
which certainly could be a strong candidate. And Paul de Man con-
ceded “the hold it has over our present thought .” 8 In his Remembering
Paradise, Peter Nosco refers to “the remarkable degree of similarity be-
tween depictions [of supposed original Golden Ages]... over hundreds
if not thousands of years in otherwise radically different societies .” 9
Edenic beginnings of humanity, treasured cross-culturally.

There have been and still are those who insist that questions about
origin are, or should be, at the heart of mindful endeavor. Even as
philosophy overall seems to have decided that “the origin is not avail-
able to us .” 10 The postmodernists go further still: origin is not only un-
available, its pursuit is wholly misguided and illusory. Elaving forsaken
overview, meaning/ truth, clarity, causality and a few other basics, it
is unsurprising that origin, too, is part of their craven retreat on all
fronts, into word games, cut-rate aesthetics, and relativism. But the
often-announced eclipse of postmodernism, by the way, may finally
be arriving. One hopeful sign is what is called the new historicism, a
cultural materialist outlook with potentially utopian overtones and an
interest in origins . 11

Phenomenology-oriented Eugen Fink provides a caveat: “The
more originary the force which ventures to open a clearing, the deeper
are the shadows in its fundamental ideas .” 12 A provocative warning that
will serve to introduce the other side of the coin: origin in a distinctly
negative sense.

What is the originary event, the onset, of the disease called civili-
zation? Do we not assume that combating an illness means first finding
out what caused it, what explains its progression, its symptoms? For
Rene Girard, the foundation was a scapegoating. An act of collective
sacrificial violence brought forth civilized humanity. Eric Gans ex-
plains it in terms of the birth of symbolic culture. Language, represen-
tation itself, is the origin . 13 Gans noticed, pace Freud, that the move to
the symbolic and its development is at base a continuing renunciation,

4 .

WHY HOPE?

a continuing loss. I’ve explored origin as a negative element in various
respects, off and on for a few decades. What is the positive draw, the
gravitational pull of origin?

Nostalgia may fit a variety of meanings or purposes. As an ideo-
logical add-on in the service of an idealized political culture, as a mer-
chandising ploy peddling recycled kitsch, for example. Serving the role
of manipulation or sentimentality is not about origin, but there is much
more to nostalgia than such categories.

There is a literature that in fact sees it on a deeper level altogether,
valorizing nostalgia as a refusal to become accustomed to the present
state of misfortune. Janelle Wilson’s Nostalgia is subtitled Sanctuary of
Meaningf for instance, and Helmut lllbruck’s book on the subject is
meant as his “own defense of nostalgia ,” 15 as implicit critique of moder-
nity’s failed claims. Edward Casey refers to our desire for a homecom-
ing “to which nostalgia, alone in human experience, can introduce us.” IS
Ralph Harper’s earlier, existential foray finds “the unique power of nos-
talgic imagination,” with his conclusion: “It is meant to be prophetic .” 17

Origin has a unique claim on us, deepened, it seems, by the void
we find ourselves in, the immeasurable loss of both freedom and com-
munity. Lost authenticity is certified in its absence, in the anguish of
separation from it. One notices that there is no negative nostalgia.
“When the real is no longer what it was,” writes Jean Baudrillard, “nos-
talgia assumes its full meaning .” 18 The felt lack is powerful and persis-
tent, and nostalgia “recurs with a vengeance .” 19 It turns to the past be-
cause there it finds something of a future that has been forgotten — and
should not remain so.

Heidegger saw in a reflective nostalgia the “fundamental tonality”
of philosophy . 20 He also wondered whether the feelings of nostalgia
may be lost because of the profundity of our disruption and uprooted-
ness. Indeed, it may be possible at times to be nostalgic for being able
to be nostalgic. Measuring its proliferation, intensity, ebbs and flows
would seem a challenging project.

Nostalgia is thought to have early modern beginnings of signifi-
cance . 21 By the nineteenth century it was largely thought of as a clinical
category, a medical condition. It was not only figures like Hegel and
Freud who viewed nostalgia in terms of faulty development, an obstacle
to full health. But nostalgia has endured, and faith in Enlightenment

5 .

JOHN ZERZAN

has diminished. Nostalgia, somehow more focused and critical, may-
go forward as more than the guilty conscience of Progress. It has what 111-
bruck termed a “material core,” 22 a real basis, and is needed more than
ever in the age of the global postmodern. Nostalgia comes unbidden,
an alloy of the lost and the found, unsettling but hinting strongly of
deliverance. Can what was once known ever be truly lost?

“Originsland” is where the various takes on the subject reside, ac-
cording to the playful designation of archaeologist of human origins
Clive Gamble. A very slowly emerging objectification of time, most likely
fueled by very slowly developing specialization or division of labor, car-
ried us away from origin. 23 “Before the beginning of years, /There came
to the making of man/Time with a gift of tears,” as Swinburne captured
it so well. 24 We know that stone tools were being fashioned almost three
million years ago and that symbolic culture is only about 30,000 years
old. 25 We clung to some kind of origin, is one way to put it.

Domestication started its reign about 10,000 years ago and the
first civilization soon thereafter. Hie story of the latter may be seen as
an ensemble of compensations. Religion, art, conquest, technology, the
Left, etc. — all means to overcome or overlook a primary deprivation, to
make up for distancing from origin.

Mircea Eliade stressed the regenerative aspect of ritual, its con-
nection to founding events or an original state. Liturgy in general is a
symbolism of the originary. In Dreamtime, Hans Peter Duerr cited the
Wemale of the Moluccas and the African Bembas whose girls celebrate
a “return to the origins” in an initiation ceremony during which they
crawl backward, as through the birth canal. 26

Plato, especially in his Republic, is oriented quite differently. And in
the story of the Cave, origin is likewise a problem to be transcended, not
a paradise lost waiting to be regained. In a similar vein, Aristotle divined
that slavery and the subjugation of women were ordained to be so from
the beginning of society; thus no need to explore origin.

About two millennia later origin was a major topic, with works
on the subject by Burke, Condillac, Herder and Rousseau. The latter’s
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality is probably the best known of
these eighteenth-century offerings. Immanuel Kant expressed well the
Enlightenment attitude toward origin. Unlike Herder and Rousseau,
Kant felt any imagined homecoming to be an illusion; the yearning

6 .

WHY HOPE?

is really just for lost youth. “His strategic use of the tale of origins
demands of his readers that they position themselves with him as par-
ticipants in the ongoing narrative of Enlightenment,” in Genevieve
Lloyd’s fine summing up . 27 That is, endless progress and no need of
origin, as a moral duty backed up by law. Kant’s anti-origin perspective
would be realized in a universal, international urbanism , 28 in which we
recognize today’s globalized mass society.

Hegel was no more drawn by origin than was Descartes. Kierke-
gaard believed that existence should recover its eternal primitivity. “If
we lacked nothing,” he noted, “we should not be overcome with home-
sickness .” 29 John Stuart Mill questioned in passing how much we have
gained by civilization . 30

Nietzsche’s early work had been profoundly concerned with the
question of origin, but he became very skeptical toward the idea . 31
“Fact”-oriented positivists had nothing in common with Nietzsche in
terms of method or style, but their repudiation of inquiry into origins
matched his later position. Reversing the sequence, origin becomes
present in Holderlin’s later poetry.

In the twentieth century, Paul Valery tried to tap the point of origin in
some of his poems and prose, seeking to recapture an original whole and its
promise . 32 Rilke wondered whether “Perhaps creating something is noth-
ing but an act of profound remembrance ,” 33 providing a positive version of
Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Every reification is a forgetting” formulation . 34
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus provide another gem, “for us existence still can
enchant; in a hundred/places it’s still origin .” 35

In Walter Benjamin’s masterwork, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, origin is the central epistemological concept. “Philosophical
history, the science of the origin ” 36 is the key to this work on the Ger-
man Baroque. Benjamin also focused on the loss of aura, mass society’s
banishment of the original, and came finally to ponder the origin of
history itself.

Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a quest to uncover
what is beneath the concept, before reality is captured by words. His pu-
pil, Martin Heidegger, in many ways centered his whole work on origin,
which he saw as unthought in philosophy. His term “the Open” bears
on this, as a kind of primordial condition or enigma . 37 He described
homecoming as “[becoming homely] {heimlich — closer to our informal

7 .

JOHN ZERZAN

“homey”) in nearness to the origin,” which he saw not only philosophi-
cally but politically. That is, as specifically a German homecoming. 38
This nationalist orientation was surely part of the appeal that National
Socialism had for Heidegger, a grotesque application of origin thinking.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a mid-century Catholic partisan of
Progress, proclaimed discontinuity and the loss of any point of origin.
In this he anticipated the postmodern refusal of causality and stable
meaning. Foucault, for example, saw history as discontinuous at every
point, such that it “deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life
and nature.” 39 Of course, it is the actual movement of domination that
has undermined this stability, rather than his or anyone else’s approach
to history. Foucault’s outlook is a reflection of and an accommodation
to that movement, a rejection of ideas of continuity and causality that
are essential to understand and overcome that disastrous current. His
compatriot in surrender, Jacques Derrida, was never far from insisting
on the wrongness of any search for the originary, nor, similarly, from
his unrelenting stress on the impossibility of non-alienation. This weak
dead-endism finds its solipsistic extreme with Jean-Tuc Nancy: “Each
new coming is the origin: the world begins its turn each time with me.” 40

Deleuze and Guattari were firmly against origin. Their most well-
known concept is the rhizome, rootless and lying on the surface. “A
plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhi-
zome is made up of plateaus,” 41 to continue the metaphor. We are thus
trapped in a presence-less present, cut off from seeing its source. They
second Nietzsche’s move from origin to genealogy, from originating
critique to mere contingency, foreclosing origin.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the contrary, sought a radical starting
point. The originating, he felt, is not behind us (as in out of reach): “Re-
flection consists in seeking the originating, that by which everything
else can be and can be thought.” 42 Merleau-Ponty found the basis of
origin in the very upsurge of nature, so very unlike the many who have
recognized only what is not nature as a source or ground.

Nostalgia de la Luz ( Nostalgia for the Light) is a very evocative 2010
film by Chilean director Patricio Guzman. Set in the high Atacama
Desert, the film’s focus alternates between the astronomers who gaze
into the heavens in search of the beginnings of the universe, and the
women who scour the desert in hopes of finding remains of their loved

8 .

WHY HOPE?

ones, who were murdered by the Pinochet regime and dumped in this
remote area. I am not privy to Guzman’s possible intentions, but his
excellent documentary might be seen as a metaphor for our situation as
a whole. We may long to connect with origin, but we also contend with
the dire realities so much closer at hand.

The way the story begins must have a lot to do with how it ends.
There was a Fall into all this, into the foundations of modernity, inau-
gurated by symbolic culture and domestication. And before that?

What we have forgotten may be recovered. Unfolding origin, a
journey to origins, is possible. Every authentic choice takes us nearer.
We feel the pull to be present, directly and fully, to ourselves and the
world. Odysseus is always only heading back to Ithaca.

[ENDNOTES)

1 Quoted in Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume 1: Bubbles Microspherology (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2011), p. 56.

2 Quoted in Alan Cardew, “The Archaic and the Sublimity of Origins,” in Paul Bishop, ed.,
The Archaic: The Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 122.

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-Sens, translated and quoted in Gary Brent Madison,
The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 75.

4 Quoted in Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1985), p. 484.

5 Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 235.

6 Quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1 997), p. 155.

7 Bishop, op.cit., introduction, p. 14.

8 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 136.

9 Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan
(Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. 5.

1 0 Ugo Perone, The Possible Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 94.

1 1 See Amy J. Elias, “Faithful Historicism and Philosophical Semi-Retirement,” in Allen Dunn
and Thomas F. Haddox, The Limits of Literary Historicism (Knoxville: The University of Ten-
nessee Press, 2010), for an example of bitter postmodern hostility to the new historicism.

12 Quoted in Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2008), p. 80.

1 3 Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), e.g. pp. 131—137.

1 4 Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2005).

9 .

JOHN ZERZAN

1 5 Helmut Illbruck, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2012), p. 160.

1 6 Edward S. Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” Man and World 20 (1987), p. 380.

1 7 Ralph Harper, Nostalgia (Cleveland, OH: The Press ofWestern Reserve University, 1966), p. 16.

18 Quoted in Illbruck, op.cit., p. 24.

1 9 Ibid., p. 183.

20 Quoted in Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2003), p. 17.

2 1 Louis A. Ruprecht, Afterwards: Hellenism, Modernism, and the Myth of Decadence (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 36.

22 Illbruck, op.cit., p. 251.

23 Regarding the symbolic dimension of time as possibly the original alienation, see my “Be-
ginning of Time, End of Time” in Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999)
and “Time and its Discontents” in Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Los
Angeles: Feral House, 2002).

24 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Before the Beginning of Years,” in Terry L. Myers, “Before the
Beginning of Years: A Swinburne Curiosity,” Victorian Poetry 37:4 (Winter 1999), p. 546.

25 Cognition is a precondition of language, not a consequence of its emergence. Jose Luis
Bermudez, Thinking Without Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 4—5.

26 Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization
(New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 71.

27 Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 295.

28 Ibid., p.292.

29 Quoted in Harper, op.cit., p. 14 1.

30 Michael Levin, J.S. Mill on Civilization and Barbarism (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 26.

31 Bishop, op.cit., pp. 17—18.

32 See Kirsteen Anderson, Paul Valery and the Voice of Desire (Oxford: European Humanities
Research Centre, 2000), e.g. pp. 25, 103, 107.

33 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life (New York: Modern Library, 2005), p. 45.

34 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continu-
um, 1986), p. 230.

35 Quoted in Stephanie Dowrick, In the Company of Rilke (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/
Penguin, 2011), p. 21.

36 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 47.

37 Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993), pp. 35—36.

38 Bishop, op.cit., p. 162.

10 .

WHY HOPE?

39 Quoted in H.D. Hartoonian, “Foucault, Genealogy, History: The Pursuit of Otherness,” in
Jonathan Arac, zd.. After Foucault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 121.

40 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 19.

41 Quoted in Gregory Flaxman, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 1.

42 Quoted in Madison, op.cit ., p. 155.

ii.

Numb and Number

T he digital age is pre-eminently the ultimate reign of Number.

The time of Big Data, computers (e.g. China’s, world’s fastest)
that can process thirty quadrillion transactions per second, al-
gorithms that increasingly predict — and control — what hap-
pens in society. Standardized testing is another example of the reductive
disease of quantification.

Number surpasses all other ideas for its combination of impact and
implication. Counting means imposing a definition and a control, assign-
ing a number value. It is the foundation for a world in which whatever
can be domesticated and controlled can also be commodified. Number
is the key to mastery: everything must be measured, quantified. It is not
what we can do with number, but what it does to us. Like technology, its
intimate ally, number is anything but neutral. It tries to make us forget
that there is so much that shouldn’t or can’t be measured.

Fifth Estate published my “Number: Its Origin and Evolution” in
Summer 1985, just as the digital age was gaining traction following the
personal computer explosion at the beginning of the ’80s. 1 The quick-
ening (anti-) pulse of technological change over the past thirty years
has been at base a mathematization. Social life in the post-community
era is detached, disembodied, drained, statistical. Its core is adminis-
tration, just as the essence of number is calculation. “Mathematical
thinking is coercive,” disclosed British philosopher J.R. Lucas. 2 Num-
ber totalizes; in mathematics, ambiguity is anathema. The technocul-
ture obeys these norms, and we dance to its tune, its code: number.

But there are some who applaud the new, always more arid real-
ity. And postmodernism wasn’t the nadir of thought, after all. Alain
Badiou denies that the Techno Age brings more and more nihilism and
mediocrity. Mocking Heidegger’s critique of the ascendancy of tech-
nology, he declares that there’s not enough of it! 3

Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), empty and ahistorical, somehow
installed him as arguably the biggest star of philosophy in the West.
Number and Numbers (1990) is his follow-up hymn to estrangement. 4
Mathematics is philosophy, is being, in a formulation as hideous as it is

WHY HOPE?

astounding. Fellow Marxist-Leninist and postmodern/speed freak/pop
culture clown Slavoj Zizek proclaimed Number and Numbers “breath-
taking. . .[it] announces a new epoch in philosophy.” 5 Zizek is correct,
but only in a thoroughly negative sense. Michel Foucault evidently
didn’t see Badiou coming when he held that “theory is by nature op-
posed to power.” 6

Number implies a relationship and that relationship is precisely
that of power, as with capital, but more primary. Communists like Ba-
diou (and Zizek), needless to say, have never taken the trouble to oppose
power. A footnote by Andrew Gibson is revealing. Badiou had told him
“that he has no liking for James Joyce. One suspects that there is simply
too much world there for him.” 7 Too much uncontrolled world?

Number is a form of being for Badiou. What’s more, “mathematics
is the infinite development of what can be said of being qua being.” 8 That
is, mathematics is already philosophy; ontology is actually mathematics.

Postmodernism elevated liberal doubt as its response to anyone who
could imagine a condition outside alienation and subjection. It worked in
a negative vein (e.g. Derrida) to undermine any grounds for hope. Badiou
promotes a positivity that works toward the same end. For him, politics
is the possibility of a “rupture with what exists.” 1 ' But he grounds this
positive hope, his “rupture,” in what couldn’t possibly be more a part of
alienation and subjection. Badiou translator Jason Barker notes correctly:
“Badiou’s canonical politico-philosophical reference point is Althusser’s
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.” 10 The Stalinist Althusser support-
ed the French Communist Party against the workers and students of the
May ’68 uprising. As Badiou freely admits, “there is no theory of the sub-
ject in Althusser, nor could there ever be one.” 11 Two communists join-
ing hands against the individual, against liberation. What is “seemingly
phrased in strictly mathematical language,” as Bruno Bosteels sees it, “is
imported from the realm of militant politics.” Specifically the Marxist-
Leninist versions of such categories, such as “normality, singularity, and
excrescence.” 12 Even more specifically, Maoism.

Francois Laruelle finds that Badiou’s “enterprise has no equivalent in
the history of philosophy,” a fusion of Platonist mathematicism and Mao-
ism.” 13 “Thought” at its most nakedly authoritarian on every level.

Platonism vis-a-vis math means that numbers are independently ex-
isting objects. But numbers are not out there, somewhere, to be discovered;

13 .

JOHN ZERZAN

they are invented, as Wittgenstein, for one, grasped quite well. Invented
to meet the needs of complex, unequal societies. Counting, accounting,
a growing obsession that began with domestication and civilization, has
reached the point, according to Ellul, where “everything in human life that
does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded.” 14

We can count and measure only the lifeless because such pro-
cesses necessarily exclude what is living. The noted nineteenth-century
mathematician Gottlob Frege proclaimed “the miracle of number” but
also stated that “the highest degree of [mathematical] rigor. ..is at the
furthest remove from what is natural.” 15 As Thoreau put it succinctly,
“Nature so abhors a straight line.” 16

Philosopher of science Keith Devlin is wrong to aver that numbers
“arise from the recognition of patterns in the world around us.” 17 They
arise because they are necessary for running a certain kind of society;
numbers have only an imposed relationship to what is found in the
world. Math historian Graham Flegg makes a similar error when he as-
serts, “Numbers reveal the unity which underlies all of life as we experi-
ence it.” 18 The “unity” in question did not exist before it was produced,
with the invaluable assistance of number.

In Badiou’s nonsensical formulation, mathematics is “the history
of eternity.” 19 It is considerably saner to notice that the development
of math is intimately involved with the development of the whole of
civilization. On the heels of domestication (and its progeny, private
property), grain needed weighing for sale, and land needed surveying
for ownership — and soon enough, for taxation. Geometry, after all, is
literally “land measurement.” Organization and engineering certainly
required the services of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics to en-
able the first two civilizations in the West.

It is no coincidence that it was the Babylonian/Sumerian civiliza-
tion, the first real empire, which first developed the idea of written
numbers. 20 Number is key to large-scale management and mobiliza-
tion; numbers and empire have gone hand in hand since earliest times.
Babylonian arithmetic was “fully articulated as an abstract computa-
tional science by about 2000 B.C.,” 21 about two thousand years before
the famed “classical” mathematics of the Greeks.

“All is number,” announced Pythagoras, who thereby founded a
religion, it should be added. Plato, a Pythagorean, composed the soul

14 .

WHY HOPE?

from seven numbers in his Timaeus. And in India as well as in Greece,
certain exacting ritual requirements were specified by geometrical ex-
ercises intended to avert suffering at the hands of the gods. 22 Nor has
this form of idealism died out; the twentieth-century mathematician-
philosopher L.E .J. Brouwer regarded the universe as “a construction of
the mathematician.” 23

It was the wealthy, aristocratic Plato who famously asserted the on-
tological primacy of math, which Badiou unreservedly seconds. A corol-
lary is that for Plato, the first upward steps out of the cave toward wisdom
begin with mastery of the arts of number. This put thought on the path
of representation and mathematical objectification. Mathematics’ more
concrete, everyday role — to serve the needs of power — makes this path
the history of oppression, rather than Badiou’s “history of eternity.”

Badiou approvingly quotes the German mathematician Richard
Dedekind to the effect that “man is always counting.” 24 Of course it is
well-established that in most primal communities people use only “one,
two, many” as the limit of their interest in number. In a recent example,
Daniel Everett, referring to his years in Amazonian Brazil, concludes
that “the Piraha have no number at all and no counting in any form.” 25

Let us also add a qualification about the use of numbers. Ethnog-
rapher W.J. McGee judged that aboriginal people “commonly see in
numbers qualities or potencies not customarily recognized by peoples
of more advanced culture.” 26 The association or coloration used with
numbers means that they had not yet lost their sense of the uniqueness
of everything, every event. This is still present with early terms of mea-
surement. The units — such as the yard, the foot, the pound — were of
human size and reference, and local relevance, until mass long-distance
civilization took over.

Negative numbers came of age in the latter half of the Middle Ages.
They were of inestimable assistance with larger financial transactions
in which there might be net losses. At this time international banking
greatly expanded, giving math a new value. 27 Well before Galileo, Coper-
nicus, and Descartes provided the Faustian underpinnings for numbers
cardinal role in dominating nature, math had already become essential
for merchants, cartographers, imperial navigators, bankers, and others.

The Scientific Revolution, chiefly of the 1600s, largely revolved around
the spirit of number. In 1 702 Fontenelle observed that the “geometric spirit”

15 .

JOHN ZERZAN

is required if order and precision are to be established. 28 This spirit bloomed
with Immanuel Kant (1724—1804). Knowledge for him is mathematical
knowledge. Necessary and a priori, already always present, number is central
to all the categories of our cognitive process. The new prominence of the
mathematical infected society at large. Enlightenment thinkers spoke of a
comprehensive “geometry of politics,” a “social mathematics.” 29

In his Description of New England (1616), Captain John Smith asked
native individuals how many fish they caught, in order to more accu-
rately gauge the level of potential plunder. He found that “the Savages
compare their store in the sea to the haires of their heads,” 30 most likely
an unsatisfactory report. Obsession with a mathematical orientation was
present in North America early on but was not pervasive until the 1820s,
according to Patricia Cohen. Her A Calcidating People focused on “the
sudden popularity of numbers and statistics in Jacksonian America.” 31
Counting consists of assigning words to things. The first counting
symbols were, in fact, the first writing. At this early stage many cultures
expressed letters and numbers by the same symbols. Aleph, for example,
expressed both the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the first of the
ordinal numbers. 32 Spengler pushed the connection much further, won-
dering whether with number one finds “the birth of grammar.” 33

Measurement, like counting, deals with just one aspect of the ob-
ject it is measuring and assigns a number to that aspect. This abstract-
ing move is basic to the universal standardization of life inherent in
globalizing civilization. Of course, there is and always has been resis-
tance. But in the words of psychologist S.S. Stevens, “Given the deeply
human need to quantify, could mathematics really have begun else-
where than in measurement?” 34 In a similar vein, John Henslow found
that “measurement is what defines humanity. ..is what distinguishes
the civilized from the uncivilized.” 35

Growing social complexity and the all-encompassing integration
required by modern domination means more and more measurement.
It is as ubiquitous as it is imposed. “A deeply human need” — or the
dynamic of ruinous civilization? There is no civilization without mea-
surement, but there is life outside civilization — and ultimately, perhaps
only outside civilization.

The prevailing view is that knowledge is limited without measure-
ment, that we can’t really grasp something unless it can be measured.

16 .

WHY HOPE?

The word “grasp” is telling; it belongs to the language of control. To
control, dominate, and hold nature in our grasp, for example: the lexi-
con of domestication. Is this really a way of understanding? What is
lost when we only measure? Does this approach not take us away from a
more intimate knowing? Traditional indigenous people do not “grasp”
in their knowing.

A small instance from the realm of “fitness”: e-devices with their
apps for measuring bodily performance as a function of various rates:
breath, pulse, etc. A way of externalizing and objectifying our own
bodies, of losing touch with ourselves and our senses.

This is part of the growing technification and concomitant deskill-
ing, hallmarks of the digital age. Ironically, this movement does not
produce greater proficiency in numbers. Numeracy, in fact, is in de-
cline. Computers have replaced cash registers; retail clerks have no need
to make change, and many don’t know how. A friend, when asked for
the time by a teenager, pointed to a nearby clock. The teen couldn’t tell
time from a clockface, only a digital readout.

Inevitably asked for a definition of time, that always-elusive ques-
tion, Einstein replied that it’s what a clock measures. The correspon-
dence between measurement and time has been much discussed; but in
what does the measuring of time consist?

Plato found an intrinsic connection between time and number,
but that only reminds us that we can’t be sure what kind of things time
and number are. Aristotle claimed that things are in time the way what
is counted is in number, as if that clarifies matters much.

In the third century A.D. Plotinus asked, “Why should the mere
presence of a number give us Time ?” 36 Which is suggestive, in terms
of how time stakes its claim, and prompts a closer look at timekeeping
itself. Consider seventh-century Bedouins in what is now Saudi Arabia.
Though pastoral (and therefore domesticators), they had a very mini-
mal sense of time. Along came Mohammad, who unveiled time as part
of a new religion. Five compulsory prayer times regulated each day. All
our days, said the Prophet, are numbered, just as math-guided indus-
trial processes would regulate and number them a millennium later.

For the Mayans and others in Mesoamerica, a focus on time and
number mirrored a preoccupation with order and rule. Bergson’s duree,
or lived time, was an attempt to step outside of imposed, identically

17 .

JOHN ZERZAN

numbered time. But the bond between time and number has continued
and deepened, as domesticating reality commandeers more and more
places and lives on the planet.

“There is no way we can escape from numbers,” concluded Gra-
ham Flegg . 37 Philosopher Michel Serres agreed: “Wherever the road
of mathematicity was opened, it was forever .” 38 The same unending
servitude is consecrated by Badiou, who stakes thought itself on num-
ber. But we may imagine what could emerge when the counting and
measuring and timing is over, by our own ending of it. Imagine what
could emerge only in such a world.

The “elegance” of math? Much more akin to the coldness of ad-
vanced civilization. Political theorist Susan Buck-Morss expressed this
with great eloquence: “The social body of civilization is impersonal, in-
different to that fellow-feeling that within a face-to-face society causes
its members to act with moral concern .” 39 Face to face, where there is
little or no need of counting.

Dedekind said that numbers “are a means of apprehending more
easily and more sharply the difference of things .” 40 What difference
could he have been referring to? The written numbering systems of the
ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Greeks, and Aztecs were structurally iden-
tical , 41 and this congruence pointed toward the global homogenization
so strongly underway now.

A hollowed-out mathematical order is that of closed-off coldness, in-
difference, cynicism. The rise in the incidence of autism is one sad aspect
among many; it may be worth noting that a disproportionate number of
math students and theorists have received a diagnosis of autism . 42

Number trumps quality and qualities; meanwhile Badiou bases
his authoritarianism on the deepest grounding for massification and
estrangement. Flealthy individuals avoid such brutalist “thinkers.” The
second-century physician Galen provides a cautionary tale: “It has of-
ten happened that people have talked happily with me, because of my
work among the sick, but when they discover that I am also an expert
mathematician, they avoid me .” 43

18 .

WHY HOPE?

IENDNOTES)

1 Available in John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press/Paleo Edi-
tions, 1998.

2 J.R. Lucas, The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 20.

3 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), e.g.
pp. 54, 57.

4 Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008).

5 Ibid. , cover blurb.

6 Quoted in Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible (New York: Oxford University Press,

2011), p. 20.

7 Andrew Gibson, Intermittency (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 67.

8 Alain Badiou, Conditions (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 111.

9 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 24.

10 Ibid., p. xxix.

1 1 Ibid., p. 59.

1 2 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 201 1), p. 39.

1 3 Francois Laruelle, Anti-Badiou (New York, Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. vii, viii.

14 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 431.

1 5 Gotdob Frege, Posthumous Writings (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 146.

1 6 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 9 (Journal entry, February
27, 1857) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 281.

1 7 Keith Devlin, Mathematics: The Science of Patterns (New York: Scientific American Library,

1994), p. 9.

1 8 Graham Flegg, Numbers: Their History and Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), p. 5.

1 9 Badiou, Number and Numbers, p. 214.

20 David Boyle, The Tyranny of Numbers (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 7.

21 Charles J. Brainerd, The Origins of the Number Concept (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1979), p. 6.

22 B.L. van de Waerden, Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations (New York: Springer-
Verlag, 1983), p. 13.

23 Mark von Atten, Brouwer Meets Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), p. 6.

24 Badiou, Number and Numbers, p. 215.

25 Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), p. 117.

26 W.J. McGee, “Primitive Numbers” in Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1900), p. 825.

27 See Frank J. Swetz, Capitalism and Arithmetic (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987).

28 William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 78.

29 Ibid., p. 14 1.

30 Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 51.

31 Ibid. , p. ix.

32 Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press,
1969), p. 298.

33 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Volume II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 146.

34 Quoted in John M. Henshaw, Does Measurement Measure Up? (Baltimore: The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2006), p. 15.

19 .

JOHN ZERZAN

35 Ibid., p. 280.

36 Quoted in Charles M. Sherover, The Human Experience of Time (New York: New York
University Press, 1975), p. 73.

37 Flegg, op.cit., p. 1.

38 Michel Serres, Detachment (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989), p. 61.

39 Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry
21:2 (1995), p. 452.

40 Richard Dedekind, Essays on the Theory of Numbers (New York: Dover Publications, 1963),
p.31.

41 Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), p. xx.

42 Michael Fitzgerald and Joan James, The Mind of the Mathematician (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 60.

43 J.C. McKeown, A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 167.

20 .

Origins of the One Percent:
The Bronze Age

W ith the Neolithic Age we entered the force field of do-
mestication, leaving — not without a struggle — the free,
face-to-face world of band society/ community. Ever-
larger settlements, more work, the emergence of war-
fare and the objectification of women were among the hallmarks of the
new order, starting about 10,000 years ago.

But the new era was unstable, domination far from perfected. Sed-
entary, agriculture-based life posed unforeseen challenges in social, eco-
nomic, ideological/political, and spiritual spheres. The move from per-
sonalized Paleolithic reciprocity to bulk Neolithic resource acquisition,
production, and distribution was far from smooth. New modes were
needed for domestication to become civilization.

The transition from foraging to farming is widely recognized as the
most profound revolution in human history. It is the revolution into history,
and must have commanded a completely new set of responses to a newly
inhabited reality. For one thing, direct, consensual decision-making no lon-
ger worked among the burgeoning populations of early complex society. A
new level of control and management had to be established. Politics began.
Appropriate mental frameworks had to be forged for an increasingly strati-
fied social existence to function. And domestication brought, for the first
time, devastating epidemics that resulted from crowded, stationary settle-
ments, along with greatly reduced health and robustness overall. Out of
this wrenching defeat, according to Jacques Cauvin, came “all the existential
malaises” usually thought of as much later developments. 1

We know that given a choice, humans prefer to remain hunters and
gatherers; we do not settle permanently into the toil of farming until it
is forced upon us. The triumph of the Neolithic was that forcing. But
domination is not inexorably or invariably linear and unidirectional,
and by about 6000 B.C. the Neolithic order was beginning to fray.

Upon its ruins the Bronze Age slowly emerged, with a marked accel-
eration in social complexity: larger communities tending toward structured
social stratification. The challenge was to engineer a new consolidation of

JOHN ZERZAN

authority to counter the social fragmentation that had occurred. The overall
Neolithic ideology and its ritual structures needed replacing . 2 For example,
a sense of individual property had not yet replaced the community sense of
property (e.g. the persistence of village herds). A second Agricultural Revolu-
tion — the Bronze Age — was required to draw (or re-draw) and more thor-
oughly enforce divisions and boundaries: to anchor domestication . 3

The first civilizations are based on the solutions to such challenges,
on success at channeling energies into an altogether new scale of organi-
zation (e.g. cities), ofrulership, aggression, militarism, and empire-build-
ing. Fertility, a staple of domestication, was expanded into great symbolic
importance in all early civilizations.

As daily life grew harder, religion presented distant horizons of hap-
piness. Belief in an enhanced life after death appears to have been stron-
ger in territorial states than in city-state systems . 4 Stronger, that is, as
political power extended itself.

Theocratic classes served as new organizing authorities, while the de-
ities themselves reflected the always advancing principle of specialization.
Each had his or her allotted sphere and role. The gods needed the service
of monarchs and priestly bailiffs to execute religious requirements. But
despite the divine sanction or legitimation accorded to political figures,
they were not immune from assassination, and the threat of violence was
needed to collect taxes in early civilizations.

Art and architecture partook of the growing social complexity, re-
flecting the developing class hierarchy and performing ideological, social-
regulatory functions. Spectacle was a new cultural component, making its
appearance early on in the service of social integration. Public performance,
like ritual, was often highly regimented or structured, and thus paralleled
the authoritarian relations closing in among people. As John Baines ob-
serves, “It is difficult to imagine any but the smallest-scale and least differ-
entiated society that would exist without some sort of spectacle .” 5

Another ideological support for domestication was the emerging
time-consciousness that seems to have accompanied ever-increasing di-
vision of labor. In its cruder, public form, the evidence shows that all
regimes of early civilizations bureaucratically commandeered time, from
Stonehenge-type time computers at the beginning of the Bronze Age to
the calendars that regulated official cycles and events.

Literacy is exactly congruent with state formation; the one develops

22 .

WHY HOPE?

in parallel with the other. As written signs take precedence over memory,
a ruling version of reality can be made. Writing provided a great instru-
ment to power and is not only, in Stanley Diamond’s words, “one of the
original mysteries of civilization,” but also its “compulsive rite .” 6

For the past thousand years in the Western world, history has been
divided into modern and pre-modern. As distant in time from the Greek
and Roman eras as we are today, the Bronze Age is certainly buried in
the pre-modern. But as we think our present-day, modern thoughts, how
different are they, really, from those thoughts in the first, Bronze Age
civilizations? How many deep habits of mind, institutions, routines, go
back to the Bronze Age and its brand new spirit and ethos? Was that not
the origin of the notion, so basically corrosive to autonomy and freedom,
that inequality and hierarchy are normal conditions and that misfortune
is not a social evil but an individuals just desserts? A notion so obviously
still with us. The Bronze Age devised a mechanical order several millen-
nia before sophisticated power-driven machinery, a stratified order that
is “the basic exploitation system which has lasted until the present day .” 7
Early on, what Marx called “domestic” or household industry was
already market-oriented, and the consensus is that overall, the Bronze
Age was a market economy . 8 Long-distance trade, occupational/full-time
specialization, supply/demand-determined prices, capital investment,
credit, and other “modern” features are observable by the fourth millen-
nium B.P. Such capitalist aspects have existed in all the civilized countries
of the world for as far back as economic evidence can take us. Sam Lilley
saw pottery as “the first mechanized production industry, the first step on
the way to the mass production factory of today .” 9

Extraction and smelting of metal ores was a principal motor of Bronze
Age society, with metallurgy stimulating all other productive activities . 10
Childe found that “modern science and industry. . .go back to the period
when bronze was the dominant industrial metal .” 11 By this time, produc-
tion was taking place well outside the house, and moving from luxury
goods for temple and palace elites toward mass consumption.

Theodore Wertime has suggested that the principal cause of defores-
tation was the demands of ancient metallurgy . 12 Of course, land was also
cleared for agriculture, especially after the appearance of new inventions
such as the plow. Vast forests (of date palms and many other trees) were
eradicated across the Near East.

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JOHN ZERZAN

From an earlier self-sufficiency to a growing dependence on ex-
perts, technological complexity brought a division of the self into nar-
rowing roles. One’s skills were no longer relatively interchangeable, as
they had been in a more egalitarian society. Social class derives from
this most basic division; despite Marxist claims, class society did not
originate with modern industrial society. It was there very early on and
was institutionalized by civilization. The individual was enfeebled, frac-
tionalized, without the understanding or control he/she had in smaller,
less complex communities. Society moved away from its constituents,
became opaque, something beyond the life of the individual: the path
to urban civilization, emerging after 4000 B.C.

Slavery, nonetheless, was “less extensive and oppressive than in many
later preindustrial societies,” in Bruce Trigger’s judgment. 13 Marxists are
wrong to assert that early civilizations were slave-based, as they are in er-
ror regarding a more recent formation of social classes than was the case.

People had to “tame” themselves to live in cities, that core compo-
nent of civilization, and cities couldn’t exist without “intensive plant
and animal domestication.” 14 The taming goes on, of course (e.g. genetic
engineering, nanotechnology); control, its working logic, is what main-
tains and reproduces civilization. In terms of daily life, notes Monica
Smith, “there are considerable similarities between modern and ancient
cities.” 15 It is obvious that we are still faced with the social, ethical, and
political problems that urban civilization introduced.

The city was “a completely new kind of settlement.” 16 No early civiliza-
tion, according to Trigger, had an egalitarian village base. 17 The emergent
urban identities rested upon an imagined and enforced community, as if
communal egalitarian foundations survived, albeit in new forms. New, but
grounded upon a highly organized system of production a long time in the
making. A whole chain of specialized activities laid the groundwork for and
maintained the integration process represented by full-blown cities.

While it is difficult to make inferences about ideology from archae-
ological evidence, it seems valid to see routine activities as the most basic
component of a minimum of social cohesion and stability. Technology,
especially in its organizational sense, is never outside culture. Division of
labor is itself a “technology” of social domination. Robert McC. Adams
thus found cultural/political complexity to be “essentially technologi-
cal,” 18 and is this different today?

24 .

WHY HOPE?

To the discipline based on routine must be added other civiliza-
tional forces. Referring to the early Bronze Age in Syria, Lebanon, and
Palestine, James Mellaart found a very characteristic feature of urbaniza-
tion in a “gradual uniformity of culture.” 19 Heidegger saw here a threat
of “destructive error” 20 that cities bring to thought.

When a city, dependent on its surroundings as every city is, has im-
posed its control over a region, it is thereby a “state.” A city must guarantee
the inputs required for its survival, must police its trade arteries, and this is
the near-universal process in state formation (and war). Civilizations com-
monly evolve from city-states to territorial states, and finally, to empires.

From the egalitarian world of band society in the Paleolithic there is
an evident shift to ranked tribal societies in the Neolithic. The latter often
included face-to-face relationships among those of lesser and greater power,
within small-scale networks. But “all the qualitative components of the state
were already present to some degree among advanced chiefdoms,” in Mar-
vin Harris’ words. 21 Developed chiefdoms were not unlike simple states.

The state uses force, or it cannot be considered a state. A sense of
human inadequacy grew apace as expansion and growing differentiation
passed well beyond human scale. Gift obligations, for example, were
replaced by tribute and the tax collector. And yet, as Trigger concludes,
“In all early civilizations, families, wards, and small communities were
permitted and even encouraged to manage their own affairs, to a much
greater degree than is characteristic of developed industrial societies.” 22

The state and the new authority relations were phenomena unknown
to humans for most of our 2.5-million-year history. During the Bronze Age,
civilization was imposed as an abnormal condition, locking the door of a
social cage that had only been closed, not secured, during the Neolithic.

All civilizations are the institutionalized appropriation by a small ruling
elite of most of what is produced by the submerged classes. Their political/
legal structures frequently claim to serve their subjects, but of course, then as
now, they exist to protect the privileged position of a few. Punishments en-
acted by early states, though often cruel by modern standards, do not reflect
the strength of law enforcement. They are better understood as testimony to
the weakness of coercive authority, its need for drastic measures.

It was once thought that palaces and temples defined Bronze Age
life, but this was due to the preponderance of evidence from such sourc-
es. More recently, artifacts from other institutions and groups have shed

25 .

JOHN ZERZAN

light on other important participants and factors. For instance, urban
centers led to accelerated consumption by individuals, in dense net-
works of interaction. Later, in the Iron Age, Rome became known as the
ultimate “consumer city,” but the movement in that direction was un-
derway well before. The grid plan of urban design is also associated with
Rome, but many of the oldest known cities were built on those lines. 23

As Michael Mann noted, “All civilizations of recorded history have
engaged routinely in highly organized and bloody warfare.” 24 Civiliza-
tions began in violence and were extended via imperialism. Warrior so-
ciety was a defining Bronze Age feature, serving to deflect internal con-
tradictions and conflicts outward into territorial expansion. The military
offered some upward mobility for those at the bottom, for instance.

According to Homer, this was an age of heroes and their long-
distance quests. Most famously, the Odyssey recounts years of travel
by Odysseus, a classical myth of the Trojan War (fourteenth century
B.C.). A warrior elite fostered an ideology of heroic war leaders, com-
plete with the Middle Bronze Age invention of the chariot. Militarism
expanded the range of political control, and represented the most obvi-
ous phenomenon of all civilizations: patriarchy. Originating in the goal
of conquering nature (domestication), society was increasingly “a man’s
world.” 25 Virility now became a cardinal virtue. 26

Especially very recently there is much public discussion about global-
ization, about our supposedly rather new global interconnectedness and
interdependence. But it is actually “strikingly old,” 27 not much newer than
the rise of the earliest cities. A key text is Frank and Gills’ The World Sys-
tem, which argues that “the contemporary world system has a history of at
least 5,000 years.” 28 It resulted from the confluence of the hegemonies of
Mesopotamia and Egypt, and casts “a strong continuity” 29 with the world
of today. William McNeill referred to “the emergence of the original ecu-
menical world system within which we live today.” 30

Concurrent with the rise of civilization there appears history’s first
international system, an economically and technologically integrated
entity. Andrew and Susan Sherratt maintained that it included such
components as “the gold, the skills, the scale, the exotic materials, the
sophisticated lifestyle, and the investment capacity.” 31 There are varying
assessments as to when this globalization was achieved, whether it was
earlier or later during the Bronze Age. But the common Marxist per-

26 .

WHY HOPE?

spective, that a world system did not exist before the sixteenth century

A. D., clearly misses the mark.

There were many and varied early civilizations on various conti-
nents; for example those of north China, Indus Valley India, Mesoamer-
ica, and the Yoruba civilization of west Africa. To focus on civilization
and mass society for this brief overview, however, I’ll look at the earliest
and most studied cases: Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Mesopotamia (roughly contiguous with Iraq) was home to some of
the very oldest agricultural settlements. Begun somewhat before 8000

B. C., the domestication process had included most staple crops and
herd animals by about 6000 B.C. The Tigris-Euphrates valley, often
called the Fertile Crescent, also exhibited social ranking and stratifica-
tion at least as early as the sixth millennium B.C. More differentials
developed among the population, along with manufacturing specializa-
tion and administrative bureaucracy, and in the 3000s B.C., the world’s
earliest known urbanized state societies appeared.

A fundamental premise of Mesopotamian civilization was the “un-
conditional acceptance of the city as the one and only communal or-
ganization.” 32 Urbanism was based on the breakdown of simpler, more
egalitarian forms of social organization, and the primitive commune was
already an anachronism by the Middle Bronze Age. 33 A single-minded
city-building policy was a royal aim throughout this entire period, to
enact and ensure the pacification of the country. Orlin concluded that
the greatest single spur to cities in the Near East was the “forced urban-
ization of rebellious tribes.” 34

But there were also primary social institutions at work, more basic
than that of policy. Justin Jennings observed that “most of the networks
that brought goods, people, and ideas to and from the city were outside
the control of city administrators.” 35 The key, as always, is the prime
mover known as division of labor. “Central to all accounts of urbaniza-
tion or state formation is the concept of specialization,” as J.N. Postgate
succinctly expresses it. 3S

The urban revolution of the Uruk period, fourth millennium B.C.,
was a basic reordering of human social life. The first literate urban civili-
zation had fully arrived during the 3000s B.C., borne on a wave of what
Robert McC. Adams termed “hyper-developed urbanism.” 37 At least
half of the Sumerian (south Mesopotamian) population now resided in

27 .

JOHN ZERZAN

cities. 38 By around 2500 B.C. even most farmers lived in cities. Another
datum that evokes the modern world: smaller families were the rule in
cities, larger ones in the villages. 39

It is the sense of the city, the ideological potency of the urban con-
dition, that is of main importance. In an indirect reference to the uncivi-
lized, seminomadic Amorite tribe, the Gilgamesb epic of the early second
millennium B.C. introduces Enkidu. He runs wild with the animals un-
til enticed into Uruk in Sumeria, where he becomes domesticated. This
key myth, among others, expresses the founding of a civic consciousness
that is pervasive in the dominant Mesopotamian literature. 40 The epic
poem Enuma Elish similarly traces the defeat of pre-civilized chaos by
the god Marduk — a task not completed until he establishes the city of
Babylon as his abode. 41 In fact, the establishment of a pan-Mesopota-
mian sensibility is primarily the achievement of triumphant urbanism.

It was the city itself, not forgetting temple and palace as primary
power centers, that became the essential aspect of Mesopotamian civi-
lization. A.L. Oppenheim accurately refers to the Mesopotamian city
as “the assembly of free citizens.” 42 A thousand years before Athens one
finds such an institution, with its modern overtones of citizenship and
democracy. Arguably, however, it may serve as a reminder that demo-
cratic forms have always cloaked the rule of elites. The fact of urbanism
in itself seemed to give rise to a concept of citizenship; Thorkild Jacob-
sen makes a case for “primitive democracy.” 43 The persistence of religion,
however, reminds us that the context is as far from purely secular-polit-
ical as it is from pure “democracy.”

The official outlook was that humans were servants of the gods, no
one more so than the king, who provided justice, ultimately, on behalf of
the gods. But in the course of the third millennium B.C., the state ever
more transparently assumed the role of the gods and their authority. 44
Religious metaphors continued as the coin of the realm nonetheless. In
this sense religion was politics. Even taxation, for example, was couched
in religious terms. The distinction among terms such as “religious,” “po-
litical,” and “social” had far less meaning in ancient Mesopotamia than
for us today. 45 Functionaries who may have been identifiably “religious”
can be found to have played administrative roles in political and eco-
nomic spheres. At the same time, David and Joan Oates discerned a
“basically democratic orientation of society.” 46

28 .

WHY HOPE?

This latter city-state ideology or ideal “endured into the first millen-
nium B.C. despite the development of larger states and empires.” 47 And
despite problematic terminology, Mesopotamian society was becom-
ing more secular; the influence of the temple waned between 2500 and
1500 B.C. 48 Hammurabi, who unified Mesopotamia (ca. 1770s B.C.),
promulgated a legendary legal code that espoused a defense of the weak
against the strong; it eschewed war and proclaimed tolerance and friend-
ship among peoples. The reality was one of increasing exploitation and
expansion, 44 prefiguring modern political rhetoric and the evils it tries
to hide or somehow legitimate.

How “archaic” is fealty to authority? Americans sing the national an-
them and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. A common custom in Mesopo-
tamia was for the ruler to mold and/or place the first brick for a building
project. How like political figures of our time, cutting a ribbon to open a
bridge, or digging the first shovelful to begin construction. Political integra-
tion, including some of the forms were used to, began in the Bronze Age.

The Oateses refer to apparent “evidence for strictly observed prop-
erty rights already in the sixth millennium B.C.” 50 By the fourth mil-
lennium, division of labor and social stratification are linked to more
demand for foreign goods, production of goods for exchange, and
capitalization of long-distance trade, according to Norman Yoffee. 51
More specifically, in C.K. Maisel’s words, city-states’ economies were
“structured around ‘mass production’ (sustained surpluses generated by
capital-intensive means), bulk transfers and sophisticated manufactur-
ing — all controlled by rigorous book-keeping that tracked inputs and
outputs, profits and losses and overall efficiencies.” 52

Rulers exercised some degree of control over the economic system
throughout much of the Bronze Age, but there was a fluctuating rela-
tionship between central authority and the private sector. Some craft
specialists, for instance, were clients of the centralized institutions, and
others were independent. The distinction is not always clear; think of
defense contractors in the U.S. today, private corporations entirely de-
pendent on government contracts.

The vocabulary of daily life in Mesopotamia is surprisingly recog-
nizable. Terms for “street” also connote “marketplace,” and by about
2000 B.C. the city of Ur, for one, had merchandise-displaying show-
rooms. 53 “The sophistication of the credit system” at about this time,

29 .

JOHN ZERZAN

“including the circulation of debts and titles to real assets as media of
exchange is impressive,” noted Morris Silver. 54

It was significantly earlier that complexity and bureaucratization of
the political economy rendered sophisticated accounting systems neces-
sary. Piotr Steinkeller found that the taxation system alone “called for
an extraordinarily high level of data-recording.” 55 At base it was the scale
of production that called forth standardization, efficiency principles,
bookkeeping procedures, and other innovations that we wrongly tend
to think of as recent developments. Modern “firm-like” approaches are
indeed thousands of years old.

The production of bronze required long-distance trade, and com-
monly involved copper shipments of many tons each. Excavations at
Yarim Tepe revealed copper and lead smelting from about 6000 B.C.,
a surprisingly early date and a “hitherto unsuspected level of industrial
specialization.” 56 Ceramic production changed with the emergence of
urbanism; pottery was increasingly wheel-made and uniform. As Childe
put it, “with the adoption of the wheel, pottery tends to become a fac-
tory product and to lose much of its individuality.” 57 The manufacture
of glass vessels spread across the Near East upon its invention in the sec-
ond millennium B.C. Textile enterprises had already reached enormous
proportions. Around 2200 B.C., a weaving factory in Guabba employed
over 6,000 workers, mostly women and children. 58

Industrialism is a control apparatus by its nature, integrative in a
primary sense. Mesopotamian writing, the world’s earliest, is another
example of a technology that arose to meet organizational requirements
of the manufacturing economy. Writing made effective management of
mass enterprises possible for the first time.

Thousands of years before twentieth-century Taylorists or Stakhovanite
managers applied stopwatches to workers’ motions in the U.S. and USSR,
such practices were common in Mesopotamia. Soon after the hour was first
divided into sixty minutes there, time became a weapon of mass production
labor-discipline. “Ur III [late third millennium] timekeepers were extraordi-
narily punctilious in reckoning precisely how long it took to make ceramic
vessels of varying size.” 59 In other areas beside pottery fabrication, authorities
“made constant efforts to standardize and rationalize.” 60

At this time a uniform model of beveled-rim bowls became ubiqui-
tous. It now seems that they mainly served to provide standard wage ra-

30 .

WHY HOPE?

tions (e.g. barley, oil), a very widespread usage. 61 It was a common practice
for workers to borrow against wages in advance of payday, and “despite
the growing emphasis on labor-saving products, techniques and organiza-
tion, many peoples workloads probably continued to increase,” conclud-
ed Oppenheim. 62 So much of this has the ring of contemporaneity to it.

Trade union activity was widespread in the Middle Bronze Age,
with unionization at far higher levels than in the U.S. today. 63 The risk
of social unrest prompted “make-work” projects, such as elaborate pub-
lic construction efforts 64 — more practices and sensibilities that seem dis-
tinctly modern.

Some of the people who weren’t interested in civilization, or its
regimen of work and cities, now were compelled to work as slaves. Debt
slavery came later, but slave status was a generally fluid condition, mar-
ginal to society as a whole. 65

Deforestation, grazing, and the extensive irrigation system created
increasingly grave environmental impacts in Mesopotamia by the late
third millennium. It was the last factor, unnatural amounts of water
applied to the land, that may have been the most harmful. Irrigation
brought up salt water through capillary action, creating wastelands and
causing the abandonment of cities in the southern region. 66 The salini-
zation effects were also felt in the Harappan civilization of India at this
time (circa 2200 B.C.), and indeed are very problematic today, notably
in Turkey, Australia, and Montana. 67

By this same period, a wholesale-retail network of large-scale com-
modity exchange was in effect, providing the background to much that
we would find familiar: commercial streets, taverns, broad avenues, pla-
zas, alleys, empty lots, large and small houses — built of mud brick, plas-
ter and wood, as in Iraq today. Neighborhood bakeries (likely the first
shops), a very developed cuisine with a wide array of recipes (including
farmed fish), sports, popular music, the first zoos, parks — many features
that “must have made Mesopotamian cities vibrant, noisy, smelly, some-
times bewildering and dangerous, but also exciting places.” 68 And in
private life, all that survives today, from cosmetics and perfume to board
games and tablecloths.

Urban Mesopotamia was virtually designed for epidemic disease,
created by domestication and its first, Neolithic crowding of animals
(human and otherwise), and perfected by city conditions. Another civi-

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JOHN ZERZAN

lizational staple we have not left behind. Perhaps surprisingly, general
longevity for adults was much the same as it is today. 69 Probably more
unusual to us is the absence of racial divisions. For H.W.F. Saggs, it is
“very clear” that “ethnic divisions played little part” in Mesopotamian
society. 70 Upward mobility for the individual, then as now, was most
common in periods of geographic or economic expansion. 71 There were
women in business and the professions — far more so than in the Near
East now — but they did not enjoy complete equality in law or custom. 72

Mesopotamian complex society, for example the Uruk city-states,
needed the resources of the Anatolian and Iranian highlands; they there-
fore tended toward expansion and war. Interference with trade routes,
real or potentially real, could not be tolerated. The very recent wars in
this same land demonstrate the same principle urging warfare, in the
matter of guaranteed oil supply, of course.

Sargon (circa 2310 B.C.) was the first historical personality. He was
the first ruler to establish a unified rule over all of Mesopotamia; in fact,
his was the first world system polity. Sargon’s triumph, amid growing de-
grees of warfare and imperialism, was not without challenges. Like most
rulers he faced revolts, and agriculture as an institution met with persistent
resistance. 73 Sargon II referred to the hill-country Mannaeans as living “in
confusion,” whom he had to civilize or “put into order.” 74 A crescendo of ag-
gression and warfare led to the crisis of twelfth-century Mesopotamia, three
centuries of decline and collapse that represented the end of the Bronze Age.

Egypt, like Mesopotamia, was a new chapter or project of domes-
tication. It became a civilizational answer to the uncertainty that those
in power had to contend with when the Neolithic era ended. “Irrigation
agriculture was decisive in generating civilization, stratification, and the
state in Egypt,” the Nile supporting “the highest population density” in
the ancient world. 75 Lacking some of the strong early urban develop-
ment seen in Mesopotamia, Egypt was — and remains — a mainly ag-
ricultural country. Its civilization rested on the surplus created in the
fields; Robert July estimated that the average Egyptian peasant produced
three times as much food as he needed. 76

By about 3000 B.C. Egypt’s chiefdoms and proto-states had been
forged into the region’s first nation-state, with a “sophisticated popu-
lace.” 77 Lynn Meskell advises us that “we have underestimated the com-
plexities of ancient cultures — Egypt being one of the most important.” 78

32 .

WHY HOPE?

Sergio Donadoni observes that “the Egyptian world appears to be strik-
ingly modern in many ways .” 79

Egyptian rulers, like those of Mesopotamia, claimed a genealogy go-
ing back to the gods. Nevertheless, it was the pharaohs earthly power that
was employed to subordinate “Egypt’s own potentially rebellious popu-
lation .” 80 We know a lot less about how that population lived than we
do about tombs and pyramids, largely because unlike cities and towns,
non-urban artifacts were not repeatedly replaced and built over. Concern-
ing the breadth and depth of religious feeling, for example, we can only
really guess, although as today, various people might have looked forward
to an afterlife that was a considerable improvement on the earthly one.
The Egyptians were the first to embalm bodies, and the practice remained
popular despite widespread tomb-robbing in ancient times. “During cer-
tain epochs,” observed Donadoni, “it is quite likely that entire popula-
tions made a living out of the business .” 81 This phenomenon would seem
to undermine the notion of strong Egyptian piety. “There is some doubt,”
adds A.G. McDowell, “whether the common man was much concerned
with what went on behind the temple pylons .” 82

It does seem clear that Egyptians favored local gods, which may
be related to the common attitude that all animals were sacred . 83 In the
end, however, the spiritual culture descended into a “religion-haunted,
superstitious, ritualistic” condition . 84

Egypt was essentially an exchange economy. The presence of compo-
nents such as “wage-labor, a market for land, production for the market, and
state involvement ” 85 certainly qualified it as capitalist. Although Egypt has
been described as a public sector economy , 86 Lynn Meskell’s study of Deir
el-Medina, the most thoroughly documented settlement site of Middle
Kingdom Egypt, provides a more nuanced view. Meskell finds that “all the
evidence points to a minimum interventionist model” where individuals
“exercised a remarkable amount of social mobility and maneuvering, ignor-
ing the sanctions of the state to their own personal benefit and profit .” 87

There were many, however, who worked directly for the state (e.g.
bureaucrats, craftsmen), just as there are in any modern nation. Scribes
became an intellectual class and staffed a functioning and growing bu-
reaucracy. Many hoped to avoid manual labor by building an admin-
istrative career in the civil service. Over time a large number of im-
migrants, chiefly Asians, engaged in building and industrial activity . 88

33 .

JOHN ZERZAN

Some of the world’s oldest underground mining activity took place
in Egypt (e.g. Nazlet Khater-4). By the time of the New Kingdom in the
late Bronze Age there was mass production of goods in several sectors.
Marked craft specialization existed in metallurgy, lithic industry, stone
vase production, and above all, pottery manufacturing. 89 Potters used an
assembly-line mode “remarkably” early, in the judgment of Lionel Cas-
son. 90 Increasing sameness was the rule, as quantity replaced distinctive
quality as a value. Industrial vessels predominate over household pots in
the archaeological record, 91 as befits a mass society.

Beer, bread, and wine were some of the production staples, plus
an excellent form of paper that was widely exported. (The word derives
from papyrus, the Egyptian reed from which paper was first made.) Late
Egypt saw a number of sizeable textile factories. 92 The kingdom had ar-
rived at “an unrivalled celebrity as a manufacturing country.” 93 Pyramid
building was a socio-economic enterprise, more focused on employ-
ment-based loyalty than motivated by religious ideology. 94 In any case,
such monumentalism created an enormous demand for Lebanese cedar
and pine, part of the major deforestation in the region. 95

Egypt’s chief contemporary archaeologist disclosed evidence in
2010 that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers, not by slaves. 96
This furthers the thesis that such projects had become economic neces-
sities, 97 and that slavery was in general uneconomic and comparatively
rare. 98 As in Mesopotamia, the institution had very different forms and
meanings from our own definition. “Slave” was not a legal term; citizens
and slaves were the same under the law, for example. 99

In the world of work, one can pass from celebrated design per-
fection (e.g. tombs) and magnificent stone vessel craftsmanship to the
dangerous drudgery in the mines (in any age or epoch), and the fact that
scribes were as numerous as office workers are now. 100

Workers were generally well paid in regular wages of grain, fish,
vegetables, and the like, with bonus payments not uncommon. 101 Deir
el-Medina laborers “were receiving good wages even when they were
not needed.” 102 Eyre found “no evidence that the wage levels of the crew
were ever reduced, either individually or collectively, because of absences
from work.” 103

The prominence of writing is clear at Deir el-Medina, and “some
workmen read Middle Egyptian classics for pleasure and not merely for

34 .

WHY HOPE?

training.” 104 The degree of proletarian literacy and culture in ancient
Egypt is a surprising fact. 105

Workers were fairly mobile, and in the case of unsolicited transfers
were commonly displeased, much as in todays world. But legal agree-
ments (and lawsuits) were far from rare, and neither were agreements that
were explicitly labor contracts, it seems. 106 Skilled craftsmen and foremen
often came up from the ranks, 107 and Marfoe noted an “emphasis on ‘self-
made’ men and personal initiative [which is] a striking parallelism with
the ethical changes and transformations of a later capitalistic age.” 108

Despite whatever upwardly mobile consciousness there may have
been, class struggle was definitely present, especially toward the end of
the Bronze Age. Strikes broke out during the reigns of Ramses 111 and
IV in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C., often over late wages. The
strikes of 1160-1153 B.C. are thought to be the first in history. 109 At
times even the pharaoh couldn’t get them back to work! 110 Other height-
ened conflicts involved actions such as torch-lit night demonstrations
and other forms of militant political activity “of a type more familiar
from our own time.” 111

Ancient Egypt was somewhat less city-oriented than Mesopotamia,
but did have towns and cities of considerable density. 112 Among their
courtyards and byways, bars and suburbs, both opportunity and crime
were present. 113 At least some municipalities had elaborate sewer systems
for waste disposal and state-provided laundry services. 114 Meskell re-
ferred to evidence concerning urban masses “suggesting a richer material
life than previously thought.” 115 Casson tells us that despite the tombs,
mummies, and grave art, Egyptians reveled in the refinement of living
and “were a worldly, materialistic people.” 116 There was also a relative
simplicity: not a lot of property that needed guarding, and structures
that were easily replaced in case of storms, flooding, or fire. 117 A lesson
for us, especially in our age of worsening, volatile weather.

Much activity and social life took place at the roof level, as today
in Egypt. Senet (Egyptian checkers) was played on a board of thirty
squares. An Old Kingdom relief displays nineteen kinds of bread. The
domestic cat makes its appearance at about 2100 B.C. Many people
wore almost nothing during the hot summers, using straws to sip drinks
bought at booths, cooled with ice from the mountains. The siesta was
observed, and of course survives in some countries. It may be telling that

35 .

JOHN ZERZAN

a key issue in a strike of Thebes necropolis workers around 1170 B.C.
was that their ration of ointment oil had not been provided.

A literature of romantic love, just as nuanced and complex as found
in the West many, many centuries later, was part of the culture. 118 Along
with the growth of literacy, “school education is perhaps the best known
aspect of growing up in Ancient Egypt,” paralleling the high regard for
white-collar scribal professions. 119 “One surprising fact about life... is
the amount of letter-writing,” 120 the extent to which persons of “fairly
ordinary status” corresponded. 121

Intellectuals gravitated toward the larger cities, 122 a tendency fa-
miliar to us. Tourism within Egypt was a popular pursuit. 123 By the late
Bronze Age, festivals, celebrations, and entertainments were increasingly
staged, and sports figures became glorified. 124 Justice was sought from
the legal system and occasionally found, at least on the local level where
juries were made up of average citizens. 125 Internalization of bureaucrat-
ic values was fairly widespread, as seen in career manuals that counseled
a conformist, “quiet man” approach to success. 126

Women could own property, run businesses, become doctors, but
did not have the same rights as men. 127 Various roles were open to them,
but their status was unequal, their position much more dependent on the
standing of their spouses. 128 Divorce was fairly common, and same-sex
relations — between men, at least — were accorded “a significant place in
Middle Kingdom literature.” 129 Love relationships, including marriage,
could be fluid and complicated, causing the Janssens to observe that “per-
haps in this respect Pharaonic Egypt most resembles our own days.” 130

At the end of the era the Greek Elerodotus made note of the free-
doms of Egyptian women: “in their manners and customs the Egyptians
seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance,
women go to market and engage in trade, while men stay home and do
the weaving.” 131 A little later still, Philon was even more shocked: “As
things are now, some women have reached such a degree of shameless-
ness that they not only, though they are women, give vent to intemper-
ate language and abuse among a crowd of men, but even strike men and
insult them....” 132 These comments may say more about their authors
than about the position of women in Egypt, but Erika Feucht is on solid
ground in concluding that their standing was “stronger than that of
their modern sisters.” 133

36 .

WHY HOPE?

From the Bronze Age as a whole, we have most of our present-day
craft or hand tools, including hammers, chisels, drills, etc. Also pails,
wire, safety pins, tweezers, razors, and many other common implements.
The pervasive consumer culture practice of branding was begun in the
fourth millennium, to boost sales. 134 There was a surprising amount of
metalwork left on the ground, and thus wasted, in Bronze Age locales, 135
which could remind us that our throwaway practices are nothing new.
Notions of Utopia first arose in this epoch, 136 likely evidence of move-
ment away from what might be desired in society.

Egypt, after a long, relatively inward-looking orientation, created
one of the world’s earliest empires. By dominating Syro-Palestine and
Nubia it temporarily achieved economic advances and overcame chal-
lenges to social order. But militarism only postponed the breakdown
of political authority, exacerbated by major environmental destruction.
The land surrounding the Nile, for example, had been turned into bar-
ren desert by overgrazing and deforestation. 137

There had been a very significant crisis earlier (from circa 2150 B.C.),
a so-called Dark Age that resulted in political fragmentation. Every form
of looting, riot and revolution had broken forth, shattering the facade of
royal security. 138 But the final breakdown, delayed by imperial adventure,
came in about 1200 B.C. and brought an end to all Near East Bronze
Age civilizations. A rather sudden and definitive collapse. The late Bronze
Age, with its industrial progress, was a time of social turmoil and chronic
war, 139 now the universal mark of civilization. The project of control and
integration failed, as nomadic groups grew in prominence and palaces fell.

A “dramatic reorganization” 140 was urgently needed, and the new
Iron Age arose to establish more efficient systems of power and depen-
dence. World (“Axial”) religions responded to those disoriented by the
hollowness of civilization’s achievements. 141 Monotheism, religion’s next
phase, was part of the turning-point rescue mission at a time of disin-
tegration. Freud blamed Akhenaten for monotheism, but the Egyptian
had failed to establish it in his own culture.

“Should we be surprised to learn that the first truly large societies
had to be assembled by force, and eventually broke apart?” asks Kent
Flannery. 142 Early civilizations, Mesopotamia and Egypt included, were
“characterized by resistance to state power and therefore by instability
and periodic breakdown.” 143

37 .

JOHN ZERZAN

We are still in the Iron Age, civilization’s current pacification effort,
in the techno-industrial era of that age. Collapse has to be understood
as an aspect or consequence of development itself, especially when the
movement of civilization has meant more work, greater discipline, more
elaborate social hierarchies, and greater economic inequality, not to men-
tion grave psychic dislocation and impoverishment, and the destruction
of nature.

Early civilizations exhibit many features that we encounter today, and
one could see mass society already present in Bronze Age societies. The proj-
ect of control and integration is unremitting, and as we have seen, it is not
always successful. Worlds that are complex and unsatisfactory require con-
stant legitimation and re-legitimation, evolving approaches and institutions.

As Mumford put it, “The sudden evaporation of meaning and value
in a civilization, often at the moment when it seems at its height, has
long been one of the enigmas of history .” 144 Civilization today — a single,
universal reality, its fearful toll terribly evident — is far from its “height.”
An opportunity to end it lies before us.

(ENDNOTES)

1 1 Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, translated by Trevor
Watkins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 205.

2 Ian Kuit, “People and Space in Early Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Commu-
nity, Size and Archaeology in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic,” in Journal of Anthropological
Archaeology 19 (March 2000), pp. 96—99.

3 John Baines, “Public Ceremonial Performance in Ancient Egypt,” in Takeshi Inomata and Law-
rence S. Cohen, eds., Archaeology of Performance (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), p. 263.

4 Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), p. 673.

5 John Baines, “Public Ceremonial Performance in Ancient Egypt,” in Takeshi Inomata and Law-
rence S. Cohen, eds., Archaeology of Performance (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), p. 263.

6 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Books, 1974), pp. 4, 3.

7 Graeme Baker, “The Conditions of Cultural and Economic Growth in the Bronze Age of
Central Italy,” in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (1972), p. 204.

8 Oystein S. La Bianca, Introduction, in Oystein LaBianca and Sandra Arnold Scham, eds.,
Connectivity in Antiquity (London: Equinox, 2006), p. 7.

9 Sam Lilley, Men, Machines and History (London: Cobbett Press, 1948), p. 8.

1 0 Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Ancient World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 25.

11 V. Gordon Childe, The Bronze Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 3.

1 2 Theodore A. Wertime, “The Furnace versus the Goat? Pyrotechnic Industries and Mediter-
ranean Deforestation,” Journal of Field Archaeology 10 (1983), pp. 445—452.

13 Trigger, op.cit., p. 48.

38 .

WHY HOPE?

1 4 Elman Service, Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 223.

1 5 Monica L. Smith, The Social Construction of Ancient Cities (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Books, 2003), p. 28.

1 6 Vicente Lull and Rafael Nico, translated by Peter Smith, Archaeology of the Origin of the
State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 184.

17 Trigger, op.cit., p. 52. There is some controversy as to whether a few large Neolithic settle-
ments, such as Jericho and especially, Catul Huyuk (in present-day Turkey) constituted cities.

1 8 Cited in A. Mederos and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, “Weight Systems and Trade Networks,”
in Jeremy A. Subloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, eds., Ancient Civilization and Trade
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 207.

19 James Mellaart, The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages in the Near East and Anatolia (Beirut:
Khayats, 1966), p. 59.

20 Quoted from Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” in Thomas Sheehan,
ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), p. 29.

21 Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 100.

22 Trigger, op.cit., p. 196.

23 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1994), p. 106.

24 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning
toA.D. 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 48.

25 Muller, op.cit., p. 27.

26 Kristian Kristiansen, Europe Before History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp 133,411.

27 Justin Jennings, Globalizations and the Ancient World (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), p. 17.

28 Andre Gunder Prank and Barry K. Gills, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five
Thousand? (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 1.

29 Kasja Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman, Historical Transformations: The Anthropol-
ogy of Global Systems (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008), p. 163.

30 Quoted in Frank and Gills, op.cit., p. 13.

31 Andrew and Susan Sherratt, cited in Frank and Gills, op.cit., p. 21.

32 A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 111.

33 Burt Alpert, Inversions (San Francisco: privately published, 1973), p. 294.

34 Louis L. Orlin, Life and Thought in the Ancient Near East (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2007), p. 162.

35 Jennings, op.cit., p. 76.

36 J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (New York:
Routledge, 1992), p. 225.

37 Robert McC. Adams, “Patterns of Urbanism in Early Southern Mesopotamia,” in Peter J.
Ucko, Ruth Tringham, and G.W. Dimberly, eds., Man, Settlement and Urbanism (London:
Duckworth, 1972), p. 745.

38 Jonathan Haas, ed., From Leaders to Rulers (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publish-
ers, 2001), p. 218. And Oppenheim, op.cit., p. 72.

39 Robin Winks and Susan P. Mattern-Parkes, The Ancient Mediterranean World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 24.

40 Orlin, op.cit ., pp 172—173.

39 .

JOHN ZERZAN

41 Peter Machinist, “On Self-Consciousness in Mesopotamia,” in S.N. Eisenstadt, The Origins
and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986),
p. 187.

42 Oppenheim, op.cit ., p. 109.

43 Cited in Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson Publishers, 2002), p. 107.

44 Oppenheim, op.cit., p. 191.

45 David and Joan Oates, The Rise of Civilization (New York: Elsevier Phaidon, 1976), p. 134.

46 Ibid., p. 135.

47 Trigger, op.cit., p. 219.

48 Nemet-Nejat, op.cit., p. 302. Postgate, op.cit., p. 300.

49 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), p. 53.

50 Oates and Oates, op.cit., p. 67.

51 Norman Yoffee, “Mesopotamian Interaction Spheres,” in Norman Yoffee and Jeffery J.
Clark, Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1993), p. 2 67.

5 2 Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World (New York: Roudedge, 1 999) , p. 346.

53 Morris Silver, Economic Structures of Antiquity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995),
pp. 154, 156.

54 Ibid., p. 114.

55 Quoted in Introduction, Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, eds., Creating Economic
Order (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2004), p. 9.

56 Oates and Oates, op.cit., p. 101.

57 Childe, op.cit., p. 51. Also P.R.S. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 157.

58 Postgate, op.cit., p. 235.

59 D.T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1997), p. 156.

60 Postgate, op.cit., p. 233.

61 Oates and Oates, op.cit., p. 130.

62 Oppenheim, op.cit., p. 96.

63 Alpert, op.cit., pp 296—298.

64 Oppenheim, op.cit., p. 98.

65 Nemet-Nejat, op.cit., pp 117—118.

66 Postgate, op.cit., p. 181.

67 Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 48.

68 Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999), p. 48.

69 Nemet-Nejat, op.cit ., p. 146.

70 H.W.F. Saggs, Civilization Before Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 45.

71 Trigger, op.cit., p. 161.

72 Postgate, op.cit., p. 105.

73 Service, op.cit., p. 215.

74 Machinist/ Eisenstadt, op.cit., p. 189.

75 Mann, op.cit., p. 108.

76 Robert W. July, A History of the African People (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 14.

40 .

WHY HOPE?

77 Lionel Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2001) , p. 1.

78 Lynn Meskell, Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in Ancient Egypt (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1999), p. 110.

79 Sergio Donadini, ed., The Egyptians (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. x.

80 Edith Lustig, “Anthropology and Egyptology,” in A. Bernard Knapp, ed., Monographs in
Mediterranean Archaeology 8 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 14.

81 Sergio Donadini, “The Dead,” in Donadini, op.cit., p. 272.

82 A.G. McDowell, Village Life in Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),
p. 9 1 . Also, “The tomb of Tutankhamen was partially looted by the very priests responsible
for the burial” (p. 199). And “By 1064 B.C. at the latest it was patently clear that all the
major royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been looted” (p. 242).

83 Casson, op.cit., pp 89, 83.

84 Ibid., p. 120.

85 David Warburton, State and Economy in Ancient Egypt (Freiburg, Switzerland: University
Press, 1997), p. 173.

86 Eric Carlton, Ideology and Social Order (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 134.

87 Lynn Meskell, Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2002) , p. 25.

88 Gae Callender, “The Middle Kingdom Renaissance,” in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 157.

89 Casson, op.cit., p. 53.

90 Ibid., p. 54.

91 Max Raphael, Prehistoric Pottery and Civilization in Egypt (New York: Pantheon Books,
1947), p. 135.

92 Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 134.

93 J. Gardner Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (London: John Mur-
ray, 1841), p. 4.

94 Carlton, op.cit., p. 139. The Aztec state was another that consolidated power through large-
scale public works projects.

95 Mellaart, op.cit., p. 68.

96 Marwa Awad, “Egypt Tombs Suggest Pyramids not Built by Slaves,” Thomson Reuters,
January 10, 2010.

97 Kurt Mendelssohn, “A Scientist Looks at the Pyramids,” in American Scientist 59:2 (1971),
pp. 210-220. After about 2600 B.C. some thirty-five major pyramids and many smaller
ones were built, along with large monuments such as Abu Simbel. Architecture and art of
this kind are ultimately about governance as well as economics. A sense of power and order
is transmitted, as is the case with contemporary examples (e.g. Washington Monument).

98 Shaw, op.cit., p. 421.

99 Antonio Loprieno, “Slaves,” in Donadini, op.cit., pp 206-216. Also Edward Eyre, “Work in
the New Kingdom,” in Marvin A. Powell, ed., Labor in the Ancient Near East (New Haven:
American Oriental Society, 1987), p. 211.

100 Casson, op.cit., p. 50.

101 McDowell, op.cit., pp. 7, 223. And Rosalind M. and Jac J. Janssen, Growing Up in Ancient
Egypt (London: The Rubicon Press, 1990), p. 107.

102 Ibid., p. 80.

1 03 Edward Eyre in Powell, op.cit., p. 178.

41 .

JOHN ZERZAN

104 McDowell, op. cit., p. 137.

105 Janssen and Janssen, op. cit., p. 86.

1 06 Jill Kamil, The Ancient Egyptians: Life in the Old Kingdom (Cairo: The American University
in Cairo Press, 1996), p. 169.

1 07 Dominique Valbelle, “Craftsmen,” in Donadini, op. cit., p. 48.

108 Leon Marfoe, “Early Near Eastern Societies,” in Michael J. Rowlands, Mogen Larsen,
Kristian Kristiansen, eds., Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1986), pp. 27—28.

1 09 Shaw, op. cit., p. 298. And Casson, op. cit., p. 80.

110 John Romer, People of the Nile (New York: Crown Publishers, 1982), p. 195.

111 Robyn Gillam, Performance and Drama in Ancient Egypt (London: Duckworth, 2005), p.
92.

112 T.G.H. James, Pharaoh’s People: Scenes from Life in Imperial Egypt (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 215.

113 Meskell 2002, op. cit., p. 34.

114 Saggs, op. cit., p. 122. McDowell, op. cit., p. 59.

115 Meskell 2002, op. cit., p. 36.

116 Casson, op. cit., p. 145. Barbara Mertz, Red Land, Black Land: The World of the Ancient
Egyptians (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), p. 298.

117 Gaston C.C. Maspero, Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971
[1892]), pp. 2-5.

118 Meskell 2002, op. cit., p. 127.

119 Janssen and Janssen, op. cit., p. 89.

120 Mertz, op. cit., p. 142.

121 James, op. cit., p. 165.

122 Carlton, op. cit., p. 105.

123 Mertz, op. cit., p. 129.

1 24 John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1968), p. 195.

125 James, op. cit., p. 88.

1 26 Trigger, op. cit., pp 627, 635.

127 Erika Feucht, “Women,” in Donadini, op. cit., p. 344.

1 28 Meskell 2002, op. cit., p. 56.

1 29 Ibid., p. 145.

1 30 Janssen and Janssen, op. cit., p. 113.

131 Herodotus, History 11.35, Quoted in Sennett, op. cit., p. 381.

132 Quoted in Jack Lindsay, Leisure and Pleasure in Roman Egypt (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1966), p. 346.

133 Feucht/Donadini, op. cit., p. 346.

134 David Wengrow, “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” Current Anthropology 49:1
(2008), pp. 7-34.

135 A.F. Harding, European Societies in the Bronze Age (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 352.

136 Jack Goody, Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West (New York: Verso, 1998), p.
242.

137 Donald J. Ortner, How Humans Adapt: A Biocultural Odyssey (Washington, DC: Smithso-
nian Institution Press, 1983), p. 202.

42 .

WHY HOPE?

138 Carlton, op. tit., p. 67.

139 Childe, op.cit., pp. 192— 193.

1 40 A. Sestiari, A. Cazzella, and A. Schlapp, “The Mediterranean,” in Barry Cunliffe, Wendy
Davis, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Archaeology: The Widening Debate (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), p. 427.

141 Mumford, op.cit ., p. 77. See John Zerzan, “The Iron Grip of Civilization: The Axial Age,”
in my Twilight of the Machines (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008), pp. 27—37.

1 42 Kent V. Flannery, “Process and Agency in Early State Formation,” Cambridge Archaeologi-
cal Journal 9:1 (April 1999), p. 18.

143 Trigger, op.cit., p. 27.

144 Mumford, op.cit., p. 69.

43 .

Arrivederci Roma:
The Crisis of Late Antiquity

E dward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire in the 1780s, and it remains a classic. Be-
yond the merits and deficiencies of his Enlightenment cre-
ation stands its title, in itself an enduring proposition. That
is, many have wondered whether their own time and place — especially
in recent times — is not also experiencing a decline and fall. Today, for
example, do we not see a parallel to “the spiritual and social exhaustion
of the Roman world” 1 ?

Getting back to the subject, it was more than just the Empire that
declined and fell. Rome’s authority melted away in the fifth and sixth
centuries A.D. And Greco-Roman civilization itself disintegrated and
vanished — socially, culturally, politically, and militarily. It was a rupture
unparalleled in the history of the West.

There are some who deny this, seeing, rather, only a bit of transition
or adjustment. Noel Lenski, for instance: “The model of decline and
fall is. . .a modern invention, which we have finally begun to cast off in
our postmodern world.” 2 Just as postmodernism “casts off” change in
general, or the possibility of change.

More intelligently, Aldo Schiavone — and to some degree, Michael
Rostovtzeff and F.W. Walbank before him — asks a very probing ques-
tion: why didn’t Roman society, so fully developed a civilization, con-
tinue directly on to modernity rather than fail? 3 Why did it have to fall
apart and require a new start?

A partly valid answer is the standard one, provided by Gibbon,
among others. It was Rome’s “immoderate greatness,” 4 with frontiers that
ranged across all of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. Rome could
not persevere forever, faced with “barbarians” on every side. I will take
up barbarians later, but note in passing a barbarian’s remark recorded by
Tacitus: “They [the Romans, of course] make a desert and call it peace.” 5
The Marxist explanation is that Greco-Roman civilization was
based on slavery, and the transition toward a feudal system meant the
end of that whole structure.

WHY HOPE?

Rome was fully formed, a civilization of vast extent but insufficient
depth. There had been a basis of traditional bonds and reciprocities under-
lying all else. It slowly broke down, socially and economically, and “unrav-
eled down to its smallest elements between the sixth and seventh centu-
ries.” 6 A malaise settled over every sphere of life, beginning in the second
century, deepening into exhaustion, sterility, and resignation. Learning
was neglected, for example, with the gardens of Epicurus and the portico
of the Stoics almost deserted. 7 Knowledge no longer mattered.

Some achievements did endure. Oswald Spengler argued that the last
phase of any civilization is a technological one. Trajan’s second-century
3,000-foot Danube Bridge comes to mind, along with aqueducts that are still
standing, and public baths and latrines, the latter with heated marble seats! 8

Rome began as a small settlement on the Tiber, in the eighth century
B.C. if not earlier. By 270 B.C. its power had been consolidated throughout
Italy. And by this time, gold, silver, grain and slaves flowed into the Roman
treasury from other conquests. When the new millennium arrived, however,
“the people of the Empire were obsessed with a vague feeling of deteriora-
tion.” 9 Well underway by 200 A.D. was a sharpening of class divisions and
“the accumulation of wealth and status into ever fewer hands.” 10

At the same time that the wealth, including slaves, of far-flung regions
began to run dry, it was clear that “everywhere the extension of Roman rule
had elicited armed resistance.” 11 Rome became increasingly dependent for
its defense on barbarian warriors; there had been “virtually no Italians in the
ranks of the legions since the time ofTrajan” in the second century. 12 In fact,
“by the late fourth century even slaves were sometimes enlisted.” 13

Rising dissatisfaction within a stagnating economy brought a period
of unparalleled crisis between 235 and 284, “during which the Roman
Empire nearly came to an end.” 14 According to Rostovtzeff, this crisis
was largely brought about by “a revolutionary movement of the masses
of the population which aimed at a general leveling.” 15 Rome weathered
the storm, and in the process became an absolute monarchy. The long
period of challenge transformed the defensive Empire into what had not
heretofore been seen in this part of the world: an absolutist state. Rome
had emerged from the crisis, but was much weakened. 16

Compared with the third century, the fourth was a time of gov-
ernmental stability and economic improvement. It was also, as Ramsay
MacMullen put it, “the great age of tax collectors.” 17 There was a reason

45 .

why the early medieval hymn “Dies Irae” conceived of the Day of Judg-
ment in terms of the arrival of the late Roman tax collector. The state
began to impose intolerable burdens upon town and country: “heavier
taxes and an oppressive system of forced services and requisitions.” 18 At
the same time, the currency was repeatedly debased (with less gold and
silver in the coinage), and rural depopulation set in.

The end neared in the fifth century as a period of “stark and rapid eco-
nomic decline, perhaps unprecedented in recorded human history,” 19 af-
flicted much of the Empire. Early on, North Africa fell to the Vandals, with
a crippling loss of tax revenues from Rome’s wealthiest province. Also com-
promised thereby was much of the grain and oil subsidies to the Roman
populace, half of the well-known “bread and circuses.” Gladiatorial contests
had been a legacy of the early-conquered Etruscans, with widespread con-
struction of coliseums for the “circuses” to entertain the urban masses. These
were something of a priority, usually built before public baths.

A climate of futility and decay could not be dispelled by government,
despite military decrees, enforced by many agents, spies, and informers, to
monitor Roman subjects. 20 In the countryside, tenant farmers were now
tied to the land along with their heirs, a significant move toward serfdom.

Rome itself was breached and sacked several times, the final blow
falling in 476 when barbarian mercenaries deposed the last Western Ro-
man emperor. Byzantium and its capital of Constantinople survived, the
Eastern remnant of Greco-Roman civilization. In the same year of 529
Justinian closed the university of Athens, and Benedict founded the first
monastery of the West on Monte Cassino. Not until 554 was Roman
authority at last re-established in Italy.

A sense of decline had long been underway, along with a lurking
fearfulness. 21 A basic part of the background for this, basic to civiliza-
tion, is the erosion of community and the separation of the individual
from communal bonds. The most primary driver of this process, and
most primary to civilization, is division of labor. In Late Antiquity we
see activities transformed into professions, e.g. legal specialists. Formal
and informal dress codes developed to distinguish the various orders,
and in portraiture there is less attention to individuality, “in order to
focus on the insignia of a role, with laborious exactitude.” 22

The general poverty of intellectual life was a clear sign of decline,
as it is today. Despite imperial support, higher studies of all types lan-

46 .

WHY HOPE?

guished. Fewer schools existed, less was written and read, original thought
was wanting. There was a dearth of handbooks, encyclopedias, maps, etc.
According to Carlin Barton, there was “a positive hostility toward the life
of the mind,” dating from the 300s, possibly earlier. 23

The universe became devoid of meaning and a stratum of irratio-
nality thickened over Rome’s final centuries. “The mass of the people,
dispirited and depressed, found hope in magic and superstition or in
ancient cults, Oriental mystery religions, and Christianity.” 24

Various forms of pervasive violence perhaps also forecast a failing
system of domination. Painful obligations on the citizenry produced re-
sistance and, in turn, extraordinarily punitive measures. Restraint on the
part of the powerful was lost, even as the legal right of the individual to
decent treatment was steadily degraded. Judicial punishment was “spe-
cially aggressive, harsh, and ruthless,” really amounting to cruel savagery. 25

The ruling classes, concluded Peter Brown, carried a “static electric-
ity of violence.” 26 At school future Church father Augustine encountered
the violence of well-to-do students who called themselves the Wreck-
ers. 27 By the fourth century Augustine’s fellow bishops had taken notice
of “the endemic domestic violence of the upper classes.” 28 Nor was this
confined to the elites. Philosopher and anatomist Galen’s On the Passions
and Errors of the Soul had much to say about violent outbursts, judging
that “The passions have increased in the souls of the majority of men to
such a point that they are incurable diseases.” 29

Besides the symptoms of internal emptiness and anxiety in a civi-
lization waning in meaning, there were barbarians; and in the popular
account it was their repeated invasions that proved fatal. Kenneth Clark
put it this way: “By the year 1000. . .the long dominance of the barbar-
ian wanderers was over, and Western Europe was prepared for its first
great age of civilization.” 30 That’s us, of course.

They were “not particularly numerous,” as E.T. Salmon remarks. 31
The Vandals, who conquered the richest province of the Empire, were
“a small people. . .indisputably weak when measured against Rome,”
found David Lambert. 32 Many historians have seen the barbarians as
more notable for their incorporation into the fabric of the West than
for their invasions. 33 More often than not, they were enrolled in the
Empire’s defense, as the number of Italians available for the legions
steadily declined.

47 .

Not that this was always a seamless proposition. The Goths, for
example, made a substantial military contribution, but not as an integral
part of Rome’s armies. Their autonomy meant that their loyalty could be
shaky. But even in Rome’s worst of times, barbarians in general “regu-
larly disclaimed any intention or desire of destroying it.” 34 The Gothic
chieftain Alaric sacked Rome in 410, disappointed in his desire to be-
come a high Roman official. 35 He had already been a mercenary in the
pay of both the Western and Byzantine parts of the Empire.

Sometimes loyal, sometimes untrustworthy, the “barbarian” as a
figure served various ideological purposes. Violent barbarians were used
to justify huge military expenditures by the state. 36 Portrayed as noble
savages, they were a means of criticizing degenerate civilization. On the
Government of God was Salvian’s fifth-century Christian take on the vir-
tuous simplicity of barbarians vs. debased Romans. Earlier and more
famously, the historian Tacitus praised moral, democratic, hospitable,
and happy denizens to the north in his Treatise on the Situation, Manners
and Inhabitants of Germany? 1 Petrus Patricius described the Scythians,
in the east, as having “jeered at those who were shut up in the cities, say-
ing, ‘They live a life not of men but of birds sitting in their nests aloft;
they leave the earth which nourishes them and choose barren cities; they
put their trust in lifeless things rather than in themselves.” 38

In modern times J.B. Bury referred to Slavonic barbarians of late
Rome “who could defy the justice of civilization in thick forests and
inaccessible ravines — regions echoing with the wild songs and romances
of outlaw life.” 39 But the “barbarians” in Europe had been practicing
domestication for at least four millennia, and the processes of state
formation had been going on for four hundred years in the Germanic
world. Nonetheless not all the earlier, freer modes were extinguished.
Bury again: “The east German barbarians were still in the stage in which
steady habits of work seem repulsive and dishonorable.” 40

And though various tribes had versions of “a warrior-aristocracy
far removed from the tastes and ambitions of their own rank and file,” 41
not to mention kings, they structured their authority very much after
the Roman model. 42 Theodoric wrote the emperor in 508 to assert that
“Our royalty is an imitation of yours, modeled on your own good pur-
pose, a copy of the only Empire.” 43 King of the Germanic Ostrogoths,
his aim was to restore the glory of Rome.

48 .

WHY HOPE?

Going back as far as fifth century B.C. Herodotus, one can find
the warlike quality of barbarians seen as a result of contact with a suc-
cession of rapacious Mediterranean empires. 44 Far more recently, E.A.
Thompson argued that slavery in the Germanic world was the exception
and that it was only much developed “in the two areas where Roman
influence was the most extreme” and civilization the most advanced. 45

Aside from the nature of barbarian society and/or its dialectic with
Rome — and the difficulty of generalizing about various groups — there
were some connections with Romans that may seem surprising. Peter
Sarris wrote of fourth-century Goths and their “campaign of destruc-
tion aimed at members of the Roman governing classes” — in which
“the barbarians were expressly aided. . .by members of the Roman lower
classes.” 46 In On the Government of God, the Christian author Salvian
declared, “A large part of Gaul and Spain is already Gothic, and all the
Romans who live there have only one wish, not to become Romans
again.” 47 Joseph Tainter saw it similarly: “Contemporary records indi-
cate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians
would deliver them from the burdens of the Empire.” 48

The dominant idea remained that only those who dwelled in cities
were civilized; Roman civilization promoted urbanization. This was not
limited to the capital, but “the early years of the fourth century A.D. saw
a great increase in the population of Rome.” 49

Oswald Spengler declared an endpoint to civilization to be the
triumph of the inorganic world-city over the organic land. (See espe-
cially “The Soul of the City” in The Decline of the West, volume 11.) The
Marxist Kautsky, Spengler s opposite politically, also observed the loss of
contact with nature and the unmooring of the individual from ancestral
supports. 50 Excessive urbanization was the main cause of the Roman
collapse, in the opinion of Guglielmo Ferrero. 51

It was “a world of dwindling towns and bloated cities” 52 in which
the countryside was taxed and exploited to sustain urban living, result-
ing in rural depopulation. Meanwhile the urban framework was itself
falling apart. The mounting stresses on Roman civilization, its empire in
retreat, meant a “hard” regime tending toward what we would call priva-
tization. Less expenditure for public buildings and public cults. “The
cities, which had created and sustained the higher forms of economic
life, gradually decayed, and the majority of them practically disappeared

49 .

from the face of the earth,” to quote Rostovtzeff. 53

“Mass unrest,” often due to food shortages, was “an inevitable phe-
nomenon in cities of the Roman world,” in A.D. Lee’s words. 11 Robert
Knapp found that “the natural recourse was to riot.” 55 There was sub-
stantial social war violence from the Middle Empire to the end of late
antiquity. 56 The fourth-century soldier and historian Ammianus Marcel-
linus wrote of the prominence of violent unrest in Rome, blaming the
ruling class for disturbances and squalor. 57 Significant riots include a
348 clash over delay of the grain subsidy and repeated incidents in 365
over the high price of wine.

Antioch saw major riots in the fifth century, and Peter Brown char-
acterized Alexandria as “a notoriously riot-prone city,” 58 to cite just a
couple of non-Rome locations. Solomon Katz mentioned “terrible peas-
ant revolts” in various parts of the Empire, 59 while outlawry became an
important presence.

Between the late third century and the first half of the fifth, the
Bagaudae, described as both brigands and revolutionaries, embodied
outlaw peasant rebellion in parts of Gaul and Spain. Their egalitarian
risings against the rich were a powerful radical critique in action. 60

What came to be referred to as paganism was a mainstay of Greco-
Roman civilization. It was the official ensemble of gods and rites, em-
phasizing the citizens responsibility to imperial authority, and embodying
unity. In this way paganism was close to a general attitude of patriotism,
respectful of civic tradition. Victor Ehrenberg declared paganism to be
“a political rather than a religious matter... no question of belief or even
emotional feeling.” 61 Its ritualism left little room for spirit, its orientation
more empirical than a matter of faith. And since its gods were tied to the
reigning politics, paganism tended toward the same breakdown Rome was
experiencing. Its gods belonged to an early age, and were far from om-
nipotent. Civilization renders citizens powerless, and its religious parallel
is a monotheistic, unrivaled power over its subjects in the spiritual realm.

The word pagan originally meant one who lives in a pagus, or vil-
lage. It didn’t exist as a religious term before Christians began calling
non-Christians pagans. But the usage is clear enough to us, and though
it had about seven centuries of tradition behind it by the 400s, paganism
was lacking in substance. Too impersonal and far from totalizing, this
civic religion was unable to bear much weight. It was overdue for a crisis,

50 .

WHY HOPE?

along with the rest of the ruling order. The old gods were too limited
and too formal. They fell into the shade.

Roman globalization acquainted people with other options, via
travel, trade, and conquest. With increasing insecurity, a feeling of “cos-
mic pessimism” grew steadily stronger. 62 So-called “mystery religions”
arrived, mainly from the East, as misery begot mysticism. Mithra wor-
ship became a mystery cult from a branch of Persian Mazdaism, via the
Greeks. It was fairly strong in the army, but its appeal was limited by
its exclusion of women. From Egypt arose sun worship, the cult of Sol
Invictus with his December 25 birthday, and also an Isis cult. Diony-
sus emerged, a powerful, universalizing god of salvation, prefiguring the
Christian savior in several respects. 63 Native paganism in its last stages
took on a Neo-Platonic coloring, a decidedly monotheistic move like
most of the other religious tendencies, but not decisively enough.

The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, made
it Rome’s official religion, and declared paganism illegal. Anti-pagan re-
pression was often laxly pursued, however, and two centuries after Con-
stantine the old cults lingered. Paganism persisted in part because of its
lack of a center; still largely polytheistic, it was multiple and versatile. 64
But especially in its old Roman dress, paganism continued to fade in
the sixth century, its sacrifices and temples abandoned. 65 By the 390s
the Christian church, a unified institution, had already visibly secured
its hegemony. 66

Christianity had rather suddenly and unexpectedly succeeded, pro-
viding a personal religion in place of an impersonal civic one. “Seldom
has a small minority played so successfully on the anxieties of society,”
as Peter Brown put it. 67 Its central and original message of love was
preached to the poor, the burdened, the outcast, not excluding women
and slaves. Christian populism caught on with many in Roman civiliza-
tion, especially the miserable urban masses. It not only offered heavenly
reward, but also a stronger sense of belonging than that of the devotees
of Mithra or Isis, for example. 68

Another central focus was of course Christian belief in a resurrected
figure, Jesus as divine Savior. It is clear that the early Christians expected
an impending return of Christ, which gave their efforts a special inten-
sity. The unique status of women and Christian care for the sick during
epidemics were more down-to-earth contributors to success. The original

51 .

churches were homes, which in itself gave women prominence, but dur-
ing the third century the status of women was beginning to decline.®

The Gospel of Luke, written in about 100, contains many condem-
nations of the rich, e.g. “It is easier for a camel to go through a needles eye,
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (18:24). These were
typical radical sentiments — which became inconvenient as the Church
grew to be a powerful financial institution by the end of the third cen-
tury. 70 “The time was ripe for a reconciliation of state and church, each of
which needed the other,” in RostovtzefF s judgment. 71 Early on there were
Christians who appreciated the relation between one god and one state,
the helpful implications of monotheism for a universal and unified civili-
zation. 72 Constantine, less abstractly, came to the conclusion that Chris-
tianity was the only glue that could help hold conflicting social elements
together. The old ruling elites, or paideia, were no longer able to maintain
control. With Christianity as the new public religion, religious and secular
authority became integrated in a more binding and powerful partnership.

Preaching in fourth-century Antioch, John Chrysostom pro-
claimed, “Oh! how passing wonderful is the power of Christianity, that

it restrains and bridles a man ” 73 Ambrose of Milan, another Church

father and an aristocrat, in the same vein in 388: “The bishops are the
controllers of the crowds, the keen upholders of peace. . ,.” 74 He also as-
serted that “priests should have nothing of the masses about them, noth-
ing of the people, nothing in common with the pursuits and manners of
the barbarous multitude.” 75

Christians had made the poor visible, and soon enough this made
them more amenable to control. The Church took over much of the
state’s almsgiving and adopted a new style of pacification in civilization’s
never-ending task of securing its authority. More or less always stated in
religious terms, the power of bishops, with their scores of guards, could
hardly develop otherwise than along lines in tandem with the secular
economy and society.

Rather like “closed shop” employment, where expulsion from the
union spells loss of that employment, excommunication had temporal
as well as spiritual consequences. It enforced the temporal power; e.g.
soldiers who refused to fight in a war that the Church deemed just faced
excommunication. Bishops preached increasingly to the elites, and the
papacy made more and more of Rome’s glorious past. And yet Christi-

52 .

WHY HOPE?

anity never lost its power to offer a radical sense of community, even if
that community was more symbolic than actual.

A monolithic and centrally organized religion and its professional
hierarchy took charge of various administrative functions of the Chris-
tianized Empire, 76 including roles performed by barbarian authorities.
The growing Church to some extent took over what Rome had created.
Of course, there existed various philosophical differences; the searching
criticisms of Augustine and — as we have seen — Salvian come to mind. A
united front against common enemies of church and state certainly held
sway, however. It is clear that almost every emperor urged the Church to
define correct doctrine so as to enforce its official monopoly. 77 Intolerance
in matters of dogma was a new arrival to the Mediterranean world. Doc-
trine is of supreme importance for the first time in civilization.

A striking counterpoint to the accommodationist, power-oriented
direction of the Church was a primitivist monasticism that swept the
Roman world in the 300s. It began in the deserts of Egypt, where the
number of radically ascetic monks neared 200,000 by the beginning
of the fourth century. 78 The impulse to return to a pre-Fail, Eden-like
simplicity pitted the movement against the Church hierarchy, civic au-
thority, urban life, and even culture itself. 79 Historians such as Rufinus
described the ability of monks to mingle with wild animals. Their revolt
favored egalitarian virtue over the achievements of civilization. “They
had dropped out of the world, because they found society more than
they could endure,” concluded Michael Grant. 80 Bishops frequently al-
lied with local elites to bar monks from their towns and to defend the
ancient customs. “Emperors, too, in their edicts, declared the inmates of
the monasteries to be fanatical, unruly, and rebellious.” 81

Violence was a not uncommon response to this challenge, which
reached a high point with the Circumcellions in North Africa, in the
second half of the fourth century. The anarchic offshoot of a non-radical
sectarian heresy, Circumcellions (vagabonds, literally) sought to restore
the primitive equality of humankind. These millennium-seekers at-
tracted fugitive slaves and destitute peasants, and their base consisted
of native Berber and Punic elements. 82 Hostile to urbanism and the
dominant order, they preserved their independence until the Muslim
conquests of the eighth century suppressed all forms of Christianity in
the region.

53 .

Most historians have agreed that the end of late antiquity coin-
cided with the end of slavery. Slaves in earlier civilizations tended to
be few compared with those of Greco-Roman civilization . 83 In the lat-
ter era slavery was extended from the sphere of domestic labor to the
mines, fields, and workshops, but it seems to have been fading in the late
Empire. Walter Scheidel argues that the number of slaves in Italy was
“significantly smaller than previously thought ” 84 even before an overall
decline set in.

Peter Sarris contends that “there is every sign that agricultural slav-
ery continued to be a widespread reality in late antiquity ,” 85 but the new,
bigger estates moved away from slave labor, according to Niall McKe-
own . 86 There were few or no slave rebellions; the Spartacus revolt, for
instance, occurred several centuries earlier. But slaves escaped in large
numbers, a continuous feed for outlawry . 87 The Romans, as McKeown
put it, citing other historians, were “having serious difficulties control-
ling their slaves .” 88 There was movement toward their replacement by
the “colonate” — those tied to the land, toward the serf condition of me-
dieval times.

Another transition involved the symbolic institution or dimension
of time. For the Greeks, cyclical time still held sway. Their sense of his-
torical or linear time remained quite tentative at best. Roman Stoics
(e.g. Cicero and Seneca) introduced a progressive, non-repetitive con-
cept later developed further by Augustine. We have been under the sign
of historical temporality ever since. Restlessly striving to dominate it
somehow, while unable to escape the helplessness resulting from civi-
lized, complex society.

Rome’s thousand years were, at base, just another civilization that
came and went, subject once again to longings and anxious disquiet
and requiring yet another new model of the same. Carlin Barton, in her
often brilliant Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, refers to the Roman con-
frontation with time: “They were terrified by beginnings; this dread was
one of the sicknesses of Roman culture .” 89 One symbol of which was the
gladiator, that figure of ultimate despair, with its thrill of what became
inescapable. A fitting face of civilization.

54 .

WHY HOPE?

IENDNOTES)

1 Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity, translated by Henry F. Mins (New York: S.A.
Russell, 1953), p. 109.

2 Noel Lenski, Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 369.

3 Aldo Schiavone, The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern World, translated by
Margery J. Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), e.g. p. 175.

4 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Thomas
Figg, 1827), Vol. VI, p. 223.

5 Quoted by Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Ancient World (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1961), p. 283.

6 Schiavone, op.cit., p. 29.

7 Gibbon, op.cit. (Modern Library edition, 1995), Vol. I, p. 437.

8 Lionel Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), p. 39.

9 F.W. Walbank, The Awful Revolution: The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 1.

10 Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978),
P- 31.

1 1 Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500—700 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 6.

1 2 Jeremy K. Knight, The End of Antiquity (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus, 2007), p. 9.

1 3 Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1988), p. 144.

14 Ibid., p. 137.

1 5 Michael Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1967), p. 525.

16 Tainter, op.cit., p. 150.

17 Ramsay MacMullen, Changes in the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990), p. 68.

1 8 Solomon Katz, The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1955), p. 31.

1 9 Sarris, op.cit, p. 75.

20 Stewart Perowne, The End of the Roman World (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company,
1967), p. 14.

21 Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (London: Watts & Co., 1935), Chapter IV,
“The Failure of Nerve.”

22 Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 98.

23 MacMullen, op.cit., p. 1 17.

24 Katz, op.cit., p. 41.

25 MacMullen, op.cit., pp. 148—150.

26 Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 40.

27 Michael Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990),

p. 176.

28 Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 52.

55 .

JOHN ZERZAN

29 Galen, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, translated by Paul W. Harkins (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1963), p. 66.

30 Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 31.

31 E.T. Salmon, The Nemesis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 61.

32 David Lambert, “The Barbarians in Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei,” in Stephen Mitchell
and Geoffrey Greatrex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth,
2000), p. 104.

33 Walter Goffart seems to lead the way here. See his Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 414—584:
The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

34 Salmon, op.cit., p. 48.

35 David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay A.D. 180—395 (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.
528.

36 Ralph W. Mathisen, “Violent Behavior and the Constitution of Barbarian Identity in Late
Antiquity,” in H.A. Drake, ed., Violence in Late Antiquity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006),
p. 32.

37 Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus, Vol.II, “A Treatise on the Situation, Manners, and Inhabitants
of Germany” (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), e.g. pp. 300, 308, 312, 342.

38 Rostovtzeff, op.cit., p. 498.

39 J.B. Bury, A History of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. II (New York: MacMillan and Co.,
1889), p. 14.

40 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 97.

41 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 123.

42 Peter Heather, “The Barbarian in Late Antiquity,” in Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Iden-
tities in Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 248.

43 Ibid., p. 253.

44 A.H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), p. 56.

45 E.A. Thompson, “Slavery in Early Germany,” in M.I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiq-
uity (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., 1960), pp 28—29.

46 Sarris, op.cit., p. 34.

47 Quoted in Kautsky, op.cit., p. 58.

48 Tainter, op.cit., p. 147.

49 Emanuele Papi, “A New Golden Age?” in Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, eds., Approach-
ing Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 3.

50 Kautsky, op.cit., p. 144.

51 Tainter, op.cit., p. 58.

52 Salmon, op.cit ., p. 81.

53 Rostovtzeff, op.cit., p. 532.

54 A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium AD 363—565 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2013), p. 214.

55 Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 40.

56 MacMullen, op.cit., p. 267 and MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest,
and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 180—184.
Also Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 87.

57 Nicholas Purcell, “The Populace of Rome in Late Antiquity,” in W.V. Harris, ed., The Trans-
formations ofUrbs Roma in Late Antiquity (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology,
1999), p. 156.

56 .

WHY HOPE?

Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 81.

Katz, op.cit., p. 34.

Knapp, op.cit., p. 314.

Victor Ehrenberg, Man, State, and Deity: Essays in Ancient History (New York: Routledge,
2011), p. 15.

E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1965), p. 80.

Glen W. Bowersock, Selected Papers on Late Antiquity (Bari: Edipuglia, 2000), pp. 118-119.
Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 33.

Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 50.

Neil Christie, From Constantine to Charlemagne (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 26.
Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 50.

JackT. Sanders, Charisma, Converts, Competitors (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 8.

Ibid., pp. 154-155.

Shirley Jackson Case, The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1933), p.78. Also L.W. Countryman, The Rich Christian Church of the Early
Empire: Contradictions and Accommodations (New York and Toronto: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 1980).

Rostovtzeff, op.cit., p. 509.

Bowersock, op,cit., p. 58.

Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, op.cit., p. 108.

Ibid., p. 103.

MacMullen, Changes in the Roman Empire, op.cit., p. 265.

Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 21.
A.H.M. Jones, The Decline of the Ancient World (London: Pearson, 1975), p. 32 7.

Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome (New York: Plume, 1970), p. 222.

David Rohrbacker, The Historians of Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 198-199.
Grant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, op.cit., p. 154.

Ibid . , p. 151.

Grant, The Climax of Rome, op.cit., p. 242.

Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 157.

Walter Scheidel, “Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population,” in Journal of
Roman Studies X.CV (2005), p. 64.

Sarris, op.cit., p. 31.

Niall McKeown, The Invention of Ancient Slavery? (London: Duckworth, 2007), p. 59.
Knapp, op.cit., p. 157.

McKeown, op.cit., p. 59.

Barton, op.cit., p. 181.

57 .

Industrialism
and Its Discontents:
The Luddites
and Their Inheritors

N early two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
gave us a classic warning about the hubris of technology’s
combat against nature. Her late Gothic novel, Franken-
stein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), depicts the revenge
nature takes upon the presumption of engineering life from the dead.
Victor Frankenstein and his creation perish, of course; his “Adam” is as
doomed as he is. If this monster cannot be saved by his father/creator,
however, today’s cyborg/ robot/ Artificial Intelligence products do expect
to be saved. For those at the forefront of technological innovation today,
there will be no return to a previous, monster-free state.

From our hyper-tech world we can look back to Mary Shelley’s
time and see the prototype, the arrival of modern techno-industrial real-
ity. Between 1800 and 1820, England underwent the strains, storms,
and challenges of the ascendant Industrial Revolution. We are living
with the outcome of that decisive battleground time.

Ugo Perone put it this way: “One day the big O with which the
Ottocento [the eighteenth century] begins exploded, and philosophy as
the great tale of totality started to be abandoned. The age of specializa-
tions began

Of course, few changes happen overnight. Industrial output had been
‘tending’ sharply upward since the early 1780s. 2 And one could easily look
much further back, to deforestation in Neolithic and Bronze Age times, to
find out why many moors and heathlands are now barren. 3 But it was in the
early nineteenth century that power was passing from the hands of the titled
landowners to those who owned the factories and foundries. Much more
fundamentally, the time and space of social existence were fundamentally
altered. As the equality of all citizens before the law began to emerge, so did
the reality of an unprecedented subjugation or domestication.

WHY HOPE?

Nothing in the canon of the (fairly recent) Enlightenment, with its
claims and promises, had prepared anyone for this. The road to complete
mastery of the physical and social environments was indeed opening, as
the industrial system became, in Toynbees words, “the sole dominant
institution in contemporary Western life.” 4 The picture thus presented
was laden with far more pain and absence than promise.

With the nineteenth century begins the winter of the West. 5 Spen-
gler’s conclusion is more apt than he knew. It was not a beginning, but
the beginning of the end. Dickens’ depiction of Coketown in Hard
Times did much to capture the repercussions of industrialism: the new
mass society, ruled by the regime of the factory and its pace, its polluted
and despoiled landscape, its inhabitants anonymous and dehumanized.
Spengler saw how “the machine works and forces the man to cooperate,”
rending nature beneath him as this “Faustian” machine passion alters
the face of the Earth. 6

There was a long lead-in to the pivotal developments, a long pro-
cess of mechanization and privatization. In England, more than six mil-
lion acres of open field and common pasture were enclosed between
1760 and 1844. 7 The pressures of the new industrial society were in-
creasing enormously, pushing the dispossessed relentlessly toward the
despotic mills and mines. New power-driven shearing frames and fully
mechanized spinning machines encroached on the relative autonomy of
family-based handloom weavers, for example. By the 1820s the pace of
change was dizzying.

Especially in the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment theories of
rights were advanced as arguments against severe challenges to popular
prerogatives. Although the dawn of 1789 had been a moment of great
promise, the early idealism of the French Revolution was betrayed by
authoritarian terror. In the first years of the nineteenth century, how-
ever, “the solidarity of the community [and] the extreme isolation of the
authorities” were still political realities. 8

At issue, in an unprecedented way, is a new state of being, un-
touched by political claims and reform efforts: a world becoming de-
cisively independent of the individual. The quantum leap in division
of labor which is industrialism means the generic interchangeability of
parts — and people. From identity and particularity to the stage, in Jo-
seph Gabel’s term, of “morbid rationalism.” 9 Michel Foucault noted that

59 .

up to the end of the eighteenth century, “life does not exist: only living
beings.” 10 The stakes were as high as they could be, the ensuing struggle
a world-historical one in this first industrializing nation. It’s clear that
Emile Durkheim had it entirely wrong when he proclaimed, “that in the
industrial societies. . .social harmony comes essentially from the division
of labor.” 11

The march of the factories was a sustained attack on irregular work
routines, in favor of the time-disciplined work environment. 12 Central-
ized production aimed at control over recalcitrant and decentralized
workers. By its nature it demanded discipline and regimentation.

Heretofore the customary and numerous holidays from work were
supplemented by the celebration of Saint Monday, a day of recovery and
play following a typical weekend’s drinking. Enshrined in custom and long-
standing local tradition, the popular culture — especially among artisans —
was independent and contemptuous of authority. Hence factory servitude
did not exactly beckon. EM.T. Thompson noted that it was “extremely dif-
ficult to find satisfactory workers,” and that “even higher wages were not
enough in themselves.” 13 For example, the reluctance of weavers (many of
them women) to leave their homes has been widely documented. 14

At least as early as the beginning of the period under review, the
beginnings of the destruction of the handicraft artisan and the yeoman
farmer could be seen. “The small agricultural cloth-making household
units. . .each so easily identifiable by its tenter of white cloth — would be
gone in a few years,” observed Robert Reid. 15 Manchester, the world’s
first industrial city, was one contested ground, among many other Eng-
lish locales, as everything was at stake and the earth was made to shift.
By the late 1820s, Thomas Carlyle wrote this summary: “Were we re-
quired to characterise this age of ours by a single epithet, we should be
tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral
Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age.” 16

The widespread “hatred of authority and control” 17 and “general
levelling sentiment” 18 meant that resistance was powerful and certainly
predated the early nineteenth century. The Northumberland minders
destroyed pit-head gear with regularity during clashes with owners, lead-
ing to the passage of no fewer than eight statutes directed against such
destruction between 1747 and 1816: quite ineffectual statutes, evident-
ly. 19 The briefest sampling reveals the range of late eighteenth-century

60 .

WHY HOPE?

contestation: the anti-toll Bristol bridge riots of 1793, the great food
riot year of 1795 (when groups of women waylaid shipments of corn,
and attacked government press gangs seeking to kidnap men for military
service), and naval mutinies at Portsmouth and the Nore in 1797, to cite
only a few prominent examples. 20

Machine-breaking and industrial arson soon became focused tac-
tics against the ravages of industrialism, and to some often hard-to-
pinpoint degree, against industrialism itself. Such forms of combat are
seen among the west England “shearmen and clothing workers, in the
Luddite resistance” to the introduction of mechanized devices between
1799 and 1803. 21 This was also the time (1801-1802) of the under-
ground workers’ movement known as the Black Lamp, in the West Rid-
ing of Yorkshire. Not coincidentally, the 1790s was the golden age of
the Lancashire handloom weavers, whose autonomy was the backbone
of radical opposition to the factory system.

Marx’s idea of revolution was severely limited, confined to the ques-
tion of which class would rule the world of mass production. But even
on those terms he completely failed to predict which groups were most
likely to constitute a revolutionary force. Instead of becoming radical-
ized, factory workers were domesticated to a far greater degree than
those who held out against “proletarianization.” The quiescence of fac-
tory workers is well known. It wasn’t until the 1820s that they were first
drawn into protest against the progress of the industrial revolution. 22

“Class” as a social term became part of the language in the 1820s, a
by-product of the rise of modern industry, according to Asa Briggs. 23 “It
was between 1815 and 1820 that the working class was born,” as Har-
old Perkin had it, 24 but the distinctive consciousness did not, as noted,
mean a militant, much less a radical orientation during the pivotal two
decades under review. A workerist identity was “scarcely involved” in the
Luddite risings between 1800 and 1820. 25

The most sustained Luddite destruction of newly introduced textile
machinery occurred between 1811 and 1816 and took its name from
Ned Ludd, a young frame- work knitter in Leicestershire who had an
aversion to confinement and drudge work. More than just identification
with Ned’s famous frame-smashing episode, Luddism may be properly
understood as a widely held narrative or vision. 26 At the heart of this
shared outlook was a grounded understanding of the corrosive nature

61 .

of technological progress. The focus is underlined in Robert Reid’s won-
derfully titled Land of Lost Content, wherein he describes a Luddite at-
tack on the hosiery workshop of Edward Hollingsworth on the night of
March 11, 1811. Having successfully breached Hollingsworth’s fortified
works, frame-breaking, a la Ned, ensued. The armed workers proceeded
“selectively. Only the wide machines which knitted the broader, cheaper
cloth came under the destructive hammer.” 27 Such targeting exhibits a
combative hostility to standardization and standardized, mass-produced
life, hallmarks of industrial progress writ large. 28

Byron, the most famous poet of the age, was moved to write,
“Down with all kings but King Ludd!” 29 More important was the very
widespread support for Luddite actions. Across the area, according to
E.P. Thompson, “active moral sanction [was] given by the community
to all Luddite activities short of actual assassination.” 30 Women did not
play a key role in the machine-breaking attacks, but were very much a
part of the movement. In the April 1812 assault on the Burton power-
loom mill in Middleton, women were conspicuously present; five were
charged with riot and breaking windows. 31

Parallel examples of militancy were the East Anglian bread riots of
1815, and the victorious five-month seamen’s strike in the same year
that paralyzed coal-shipping ports and the east coast coal trade. Frame-
breaking had been made a hanging offense in 1812, and repression hit
its high point in 1817 with suspension of habeas corpus rights.

But upon the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, a long era began
that was decisively centered on political reform (e.g. reform of parlia-
mentary representation) and trade unionism. Unions, then as now, exist
to broker the relationship between owners and workers. A more or less
scattered, independent and often recalcitrant population becomes com-
bined, represented, and disciplined via unionism. 32 This is much less
some kind of conspiracy than an accommodation to the great pressures
pushing industrial wage-slavery.

As early as Lord Holland’s 1812 efforts to channel Luddite energy
in a reform direction, there had been interest in somehow moving it
away from its real focus. Luddism had to do with something incom-
parably more basic than politics and unions, but it failed in its frontal
assault. A major late-inning target was John Heathcote’s lace factory at
Longborough in June 1816, and the Folly Hill and Pentrick risings a

62 .

WHY HOPE?

year later “can be regarded as the last flicker of Luddism in its desperate,
violent and political phase.” 33 This last adjective refers to a key aspect of
the defeat of machine destruction: its diversion into reform channels.

Oppositional energies could still be found, but from this point on
they were more often in evidence in more approved contexts. In Bris-
tol, for example, “gangs of disorderly fellows there assembled, throwing
stinking fish, dead cats, dogs, rats, and other offensive missiles” during
an election campaign. 34 The “Swing” riots throughout southeast Eng-
land in 1830—1831 harkened back to anti-industrial militancy. Agricul-
tural laborers resented threshing machines that were turning farms into
factories; they resorted to destroying them and burning owners’ prop-
erty. 35 Their direct action and communal organization marked them as
agricultural Luddites. Another, and pretty much final, outbreak was the
Plug riots in the summer of 1842, when a thousand armed workers
held Manchester for several days in a general strike. But the second and
third generation came to accept as natural the confinement and deskill-
ing of industrial labor. Only starvation could conquer a few holdouts,
notably handloom weavers, terribly outflanked by the factories. What
happened, or failed to happen, in the turning-point years of 1800 to
1820 sealed people’s fate. The ultimate victor was a new, much deeper
level of domestication.

The Luddite challenge to the new order stood out, and continues to
inspire. Another, somewhat neglected aspect or current was that of reli-
gious utopianism, known as millenarianism. This movement (or move-
ments) shed virtually all association with traditional religious belief. It
was distant from that agent of social control, the Church of England,
and turned its back(s) on the C of E’s main rival, Methodism (a.k.a.
Dissenting or Non-Conformist). The millennials were anti-clerical and
even at times anti-Christian. 36 They promised a vast transformation;
their prophets threatened to “turn the world upside down,” similar to
the aims of secular revolutionaries. 37 Millenarianism was “directed to
the destruction of existing society,” and the reigning authorities believed
in the possibility that it “might be sufficient to spark off the explosive
mixture of social discontent and radical sentiment” then prevailing. 38

The Methodist leadership recoiled in horror from the Luddite mo-
mentum and likewise from the many faces of millenarian extremism,
some number of which were breakaways from Methodism. The Primi-

63 .

tive Methodist Connexion was steadily growing, along with the “magic
Methodists” of Delamere Forest, and the “Kirkgate Screamers” of Leeds,
among the many disaffected offshoots. 39 Some of these (and other similar
groups) were explicitly referred to as Ranters, recognizing a link to the
Ranters (and Diggers) of the seventeenth-century millenarianist rebellion.
Already in the 1790s “cheap reprints of long-buried works of Ranter and
Antinomian [literally, anti-law] complexion” were circulating. 40

The Scottish Buchanites, followers of Elspeth Simpson Buchan,
wished to hold all things in common and rejected the bonds of official
marriage. The Wroeites were largely wool-combers and handloom weav-
ers, fighting against the extinction of their crafts. The more numerous
Muggletonians, led by the tailor Ludovic Muggle, offered a refuge to the
oppressed and excluded. Among the myriad groups and sects a range of
millennial faiths can be found. Joanna Southcott, with her thousands of
Southcottians, was a feminist — but not a radical one. Some of her flock,
like Peter Morison and John Ward, were on the fiery side; in 1806 Mori-
son preached the confiscation of “all the property and land belonging
to the rich.” 41 Richard Brothers of the New Jerusalem proclaimed that
“now is the whore of Babylon falling” and the future will see “no more
war, no more want.” 42 Robert Wedderburn, a black sailor, attracted the
“most extreme and impoverished radicals” to his London chapel. 43

The millenarian impulse was by no means an isolated, cranky,
or unrepresentative passion. In the 1790s it emerged “on a scale un-
known since the seventeenth century,” judged E.P. Thompson. 44 “From
the 1790s to at least the 1830s radical millenarianism could pose a real
threat” to the dominant system, precisely because it did not accept the
ruling paradigm or participate within it. 45 It was an active critique of the
deep assumptions of the ruling order.

Domestic servants and small shopkeepers were among the adher-
ents, as well as artisans and other dispossessed craftspeople who were the
spearhead of the Luddite ranks. And in 1813 a New Connexion minis-
ter, George Beaumont, was charged with inspiring the Luddite attacks
in the Fluddersfield area.

Thomas Spence was an influential, apocalyptic figure who found
inspiration in the seventeenth-century visionaries. He reprinted a Dig-
ger tract from that era by Gerald Winstanley, and likewise attacked
private property as standing against God’s common storehouse. Spence

64 .

WHY HOPE?

was convinced that “God was a very notorious Leveller” and that it was
possible and necessary for humble men to turn the world upside down. 46

Alas, the world wasn’t turned upside down. The civilizing machine
persevered through the storms. Religion, in its usual role, taught respect
for authority and had a new weapon in its arsenal: the evangelical re-
vival’s campaign for industrial discipline.

William Blake, of “dark Satanic mills” fame, was an enigmatic, id-
iosyncratic figure who certainly played a part in this period. Not fully a
millenarian or a Romantic either, Blake took as his central theme “the
need to release the human spirit from bondage.” 47 Starting from an ori-
entation toward class struggle, Blake ultimately opposed kingship, and
rulership itself. 48

His Songs of Experience (1790s) point in a radical and millenarian
direction, and he provided a radical critique of the limits of Sweden-
borgianism. But Blake can be characterized more as a Jacobin reformer
than a revolutionary millennial. Consistency may be hard to find over-
all, though some observations, rendered in his own inimitable style, hit
the mark. He found the factory and the workhouse terribly wrong and,
as with the Luddites, saw the destruction of traditional workmanship as
the end of working people’s integrity. Mechanized time was a particu-
larly important target: “the hours of folly are measured by the clock, but
of wisdom: no clock can measure,” for example. 49

Blake’s outlook on both nature and women has to be seen as quite
flawed. His antifeminism is hard to miss, and there is a contempt for
nature, as female and therefore secondary to the male. Social harmony
is a major goal, but harmony or balance with nature, as championed
by the Romantics or William Morris, for instance, was of no interest to
Blake. 50 He desired the “Immediate by Perception or Sense at once,” 51
but it did not occur to him to ground this desire in the non-symbolic
natural world.

E.P. Thompson clearly went too far in asserting, “Never, on any
page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the
Beast.” 52 More accurate was his appraisal that few “delivered such shrewd
and accurate blows against the ideological defenses of their society.” 53

The first two decades of the nineteenth century were the heart of
the Romantic period, and the course of this literary movement reflects
what took place socially and politically in those years. At the beginning,

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JOHN ZERZAN

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others gave voice to “an explosion
of millenarial and apocalyptic enthusiasm for the new dawn.” 54 Writing
in 1804, Wordsworth recalled the exhilaration of ten years or so earlier,
when the French revolution announced a new world and the factory
system had not yet metastasized: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
/But to be young was very Heaven!” 55 In its first bloom especially, Ro-
manticism sought to reconcile humans and nature, consciousness and
unconsciousness. As Northrup Frye put it, “the contrast between the
mechanical and the organic is deeply rooted in Romantic thinking.” 56
Rene Wellek noted that such thinking could be seen as “an upsurge of
the unconscious and the primitive.” 57

Events, soon to be defined by Marx and other industrializers as
Progress, undid optimism and a sense of possibilities, as we have seen.
Sunny Enlightenment predictions about the perfectibility of society
were already turning to ashes, as people became increasingly separated
from nature and entered the state of modern, industrial slavery. A great
sense of disappointment overtook the earlier aspirations, which were
rapidly being destroyed by each new advance of industrial capitalism.
From this point onward, disillusionment, ennui, and boredom became
central to life in the West.

William Wordsworth acknowledged the existence and importance
of a spirit of wild nature, which Blake resisted in him. Wordsworth
was particularly moved by the decline of the domestic or pre-industrial
mode of production and its negative impact on the poor and on fami-
lies. 58 Privation, a sense of what has been lost, is a key theme in Word-
sworth. His well-known decline as a poet after 1807 seems linked to the
pessimism, even despair, that began to get the upper hand. He saw that
the Enlightenment enshrining of Reason had failed, and he abandoned
Nature as a source of value or hope.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s anguish at the erosion of community
brought surrender and drug addiction. His Rime of the Ancient Mari-
ner testifies to the erosion of values in the absence of community. His
“Michael” poems completed a series on abandonment and meaningless
loss. A major poet who collapsed back into Anglican orthodoxy — as did
Wordsworth — and nationalist conservatism.

One who kept the liberatory Romantic flame burning longer was
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Influenced by the anarchist William Godwin,

66 .

WHY HOPE?

Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) contains these lines:

Power, like a desolating pestilence.

Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience.

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth.

Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,

A mechanized automaton. (Ill, 176) 59

Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy (1819) is an angry call to arms following
the government assault on protestors, known as the Peterloo Massacre
(e.g. “Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number”). 60 But
he too flamed out, lost his way. The Hyperion project was dropped, and
a major work, Prometheus Unbound, presents a confusing picture. By
1820 his passion had been quelled.

Of aristocratic lineage, George Gordon, Lord Byron was a lifelong
radical. He spoke out against making frame-breaking a capital offense,
and defended the impoverished. His brazen, bisexual behavior shocked
a society he despised. With Childe Harold and Don Juan, transgressors
escaped their “just desserts” and instead were glamorized. Byron saw
nature as a value in itself; his nature poetry is correspondingly instinctive
and immediate (as is that of his contemporary, John Keats).

He was the most famous of living Englishmen but said goodbye to
England in 1816, first to join forces with Carbonari partisans in Italy,
and later on the side of Greek rebels, among whom he died in 1824. “I
have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing gov-
ernments,” he had declared. 61

Dino Falluga recognized that some celebrated the death of Byron and
what he represented. Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a few
decades after the fact that thanks to Byron’s death the culture was finally
able to grow up. It “becomes accustomed to the Mill,” rather than quix-
otically defending the Luddites as Byron did. 62 Expectations of change did
indeed die with Byron, if not before. There was frustration with individual
disappointments, also with a generalized, now chronic condition. Now the
solitary poet becomes a true fixture, true to the reality that the poet — and
not only the poet — is losing the last resource, one’s own authority over one-
self. Another deep loss of this era, perhaps the deepest. The age of no more
autonomy, of no more hope of making things basically different.

67 .

JOHN ZERZAN

The Gothic novel represents the dark side of Romanticism. It had been
launched decades earlier, with Horace Walpoles anti-Enlightenment The Cas-
tle of Otranto (1764), and outlived Romanticism considerably. Its rise suggests
resistance to the ideas of progress and development. The more psychoanalyti-
cally inclined see the Gothic as a return of what had been repressed: “a rebel-
lion against a constraining neoclassical aesthetic ideal of order and unity, in
order to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom.” 63
A common feature of many Gothic novels is a look backward to a
simpler and more harmonious world — a connection to Rousseauian primi-
tivism. Gothic’s revolt against the new mechanistic model for society of-
ten idealizes the medieval world (hence the term Gothic) as one of organic
wholeness. But this rather golden past could hardly be recognized through
the distorting terror of the intervening years. Gothic ruins and haunted
houses in print reflected the production of real ruins, real nightmares. The
trauma of frilly Enlightened modernity finds its echo in inhuman literary
settings where the self is hopelessly lost and ultimately destroyed. The de-
pravity of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, hailed by the Marquis de Sade, comes
to mind, as does Maty Shelley’s Frankenstein, which demonizes its own cre-
ation. Soon, however, the Gothic became as mechanistic a genre as the social
order it rejected. Its formulaic products are still being churned out.

The formation of malleable character, adaptable to the regimen of
industrial life, was of obvious importance to the various managers in the
early nineteenth century. Hence a key argument for support of schools
was that they were “a form of social insurance.” 64 In Eric Evans’ sum-
mary, “By 1815 the argument was not whether education for the lower
orders was proper but how much should be provided.” 65

The dinnerware manufacturer Thomas Wedgwood wanted a rigor-
ous, disciplinary system of education and tried to enlist Wordsworth as its
superintendent. His response, in The Prelude, includes these stinging lines:

The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties,

And Stewards of our labor, watchful men
And skillful in the usury of time.

Sages, who in their prescience would controul

All accidents and to the very road

Which they have fashion'd would confine us down,

Like engines ... 66

68 .

WHY HOPE?

Private, usually Christian, schools received some government fund-
ing, but a national system of education was rather slow in arriving.

Food rioters, anti-enclosure fence-breakers, not to mention Luddites,
could end up on the gallows, but a modern uniformed police force was
not implemented much earlier than was a standardized school system.
While those in authority had great need of law enforcement, they faced
the deep-rooted hostility of the majority. Prevailing sentiment held that
personal morality should not be subject to scrutiny by the armed force
of society and law. Police were opposed as “paid agents of the state who
informed on their neighbors and interfered in private life.” 67

Uniformed police were on the streets of London with passage of the
Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, but strong antipathy to the new institu-
tion persisted. At a political reform rally in Coldbath Fields, London in
1833 a struggle broke out and three officers were stabbed, one fatally. The
subsequent coroners jury brought in a verdict of justifiable homicide.

The change toward formal policing was just one aspect of an en-
forced social shift already underway. Increased control of mores intro-
duced laws against “public indecency,” and other punitive measures were
enshrined in the Vagrant Act of 1822. This was part of the transition
from “a largely communal to a primarily state-oriented, bureaucratically
organized and professionally supported civic culture,” in the words of
M.J.D. Roberts. 68 Idleness was a mark against the overall industrial fu-
ture, so the treadmill was introduced. (Idleness among the rich was quite
different, needless to say.) Unauthorized fairs were subject to suppres-
sion, though they showed considerable staying power; the Vagrant Act
of 1824 was aimed at a variety of popular entertainments. The outlaw-
ing of “blood sports” like cock-fighting and bull-baiting may be seen as
a positive move; but there was no talk of banning hunting of fox, rabbit,
and deer by the upper crust.

Driven by the enclosure movement at base, privatization struck on
all levels. Domesticity tended to crowd out the social, and happiness
became “a fireside thing.” 69 Enclosure meant an absolutization of private
property; enjoyment was increasingly private and confined. The home
itself becomes more specifically divided, isolating family members with-
in the household. 70 Movement is toward segregation of the sexes and
identification of women with domesticity. The family and its division of
labor become integrated with the trajectory of industry.

69 .

JOHN ZERZAN

Consumer demand for cheap manufactured goods was an under-
lying, emergent key to the Industrial Revolution. This “demand” was
not exactly spontaneous; new wants were now very widely advertised
and promoted, filling the vacuum of what had been taken away. The
decline in traditional self-sufficiency was everywhere apparent; beer and
bread were now more often bought than brewed and baked at home, for
example. Standardized goods — and a standardized national language —
were in full flow. 71

A stronger emphasis on the need for regular, predictable labor is
shown by the prevalence of factory clocks, schedules, and timetables; also
domestic clocks and personal watches, once luxury items and now con-
sumer necessities. By the 1820s, nostalgic images were being reproduced
using the kinds of technology that erased the lost, commemorated world. 72
As a relatively self-sustaining arrangement of life, rural society was ending,
fast becoming a commercial item to be wistfully contemplated.

Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1833 of the ascendant standards of decorum
and conformity: “The English of the present day are not the English of
twenty years ago.” 73 Diversions that many had enjoyed throughout their
lives — public drinking, many holidays from work, boisterous street fairs,
etc. — were seen as disgraceful and disgusting under the new order.

As the average person was being subdued and tamed, a few were
lionized. Industrial modernity ushered in what is so prominent today,
celebrity culture. The flamboyant actor Thomas Kean was an early star,
but none surpassed the fame of Byron. He was one of the first ever to
receive what we would call fan mail, that is, unsolicited letters on a mass
scale. 74 Massified life also initiated widespread psychic immiseration.
The best seller of 1806 was The Miseries of Human Life, testifying to the
large-scale anxiety and depression that had already set in, inevitable fruit
of modern subjugation.

The door that was forced open decisively between 1800 and 1820,
roughly speaking (and 1 do mean roughly), inaugurated both global
warming and an ever-mounting rise in global population. Globalizing
industrialization is the motive force behind both developments. A deep-
ening technological dimension becomes more and more immersive and
defining, driving the loss of meaning, passion, and connection. This
trajectory continually reaches new levels, at an ever accelerating rate.
As early as the 1950s, new technology was hailed by many as a “Second

70 .

WHY HOPE?

Industrial Revolution.” 75 In 1960 Clark Kerr and others announced that
“the world is entering a new age — the age of total industrialization.” 76
As the nineteenth century waned, William Morris, who disliked all
machinery, concluded that “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful
things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern
civilization.” 77 His News from Nowhere expresses a wonderful reversal of
perspective, in which Ellen speaks from a time that has set aside the tech-
no-desolation: “And even now, when all is won and has been for a long
time, my heart is sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has
gone on for so many years.” “So many centuries, she said, so many ages.” 78

IENDNOTES)

1 Ugo Perone, The Possible Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 201 1), p. 60.

2 T.S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century , vol. 3 (London: Methuen,
1955), p. 125.

3 G.W. Dimbleby, The Development of British Heathlands and their Soils (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962), e.g. pp. 29, 44.

4 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol I (London: Oxford University Press, 1 934 —
1958), p. 8.

5 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), e.g. p. 78.

6 Ibid., p. 503.

7 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780—1880 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 125.

8 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966),
p. 583.

9 Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).

1 0 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 161.

1 1 Robert N. Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973), p. 86.

1 2 Somewhat recent scholarship has challenged Ashton, Landes and others as having over-
generalized the irregularity of pre-industrial work habits; e.g. Mark Harrison, Crowds and
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 5, esp. p. 111. But the overall
description seems valid.

1 3 F.M.L. Thompson, The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750—1950, vol. 2 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp 129, 130.

14 Ashton, op.cit., p. 1 17.

1 5 Robert Reid, Land of Lost Content: The Luddite Revolt, 1812 (London: Heinemann, 1986),
pp. 294-295.

1 6 Quoted in Ben Wilson, Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant 1789—1837 (London: Faber
and Faber, 2007), p. 356.

17 Ibid., p. 74.

18 E.P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree:
Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Verso, 2011), p. 277

1 9 Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), pp. 150-151.

71 .

JOHN ZERZAN

20 Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998), p. 229.

21 Thompson in Hay et al., op.cit., p. 275.

22 Neil J. Smelser, “Sociological History,” in M.W. Flinn andT.C. Smout, eds., Essays in Social
History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), pp. 31—32.

23 Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in Flinn and
Smout, op.cit., p. 154.

24 Perkin, op.cit., p. 213.

25 Smelser, op.cit., p. 31.

26 Katrina Navickas, “The Search for ‘General Ludd’: The Mythology of Luddism,” Social
History 30:3 (August 2005).

27 Reid, op.cit., pp. 59-60.

28 The radical impulse in Ireland was diverted into Ribbonism, somewhat like Luddism, but
lost in a nationalist emphasis. Simon Edwards “Nation and State,” in Zachary Leader and
Ian Haywood, eds., Romantic Period Writings 1798— 1832: An Anthology (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1998), p. 125.

29 Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1996), p. 17.

30 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 585.

31 Rogers, op.cit., p. 238.

32 For the conservative role of unions see John Zerzan, “Who Killed Ned Ludd?” in John
Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999), pp. 205—21 1.

33 Edward Royle, Revolutionary Brittania?: Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain,
1789—1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 51.

34 M. Harrison, op.cit., p. 179.

35 Roland Quinault, “The Industrial Revolution and Parliamentary Reform,” in Patrick K.
O’Brien and Roland Quinault, eds., The Industrial Revolution and British Society (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 197.

36 J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780—1850 (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 10.

37 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 61 .

38 J.F.C. Harrison, op.cit., pp 50, 77.

39 Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783—870 (New
York: Longman, 1983), p. 53.

40 Iain McCalman, “New Jerusalem: Prophesy, Dissent and Radical Culture in England,
1786—1830,” in Knud Haakonsen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in
Eighteenth Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 324.

41 J.F.C. Harrison, op.cit., p. 127.

42 Quoted in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, op.cit., p. 118.

43 I. McCalman, op.cit., p. 139.

44 E.A. Thompson, Making, op.cit., p. 116.

45 E. Royle, op.cit., p. 45.

46 I. McCalman, op.cit., p. 63.

47 Shiv Kumar, “The New Jerusalem of William Blake,” in Shiv Kumar, ed., British Romantic
Poets (New York: New York University Press, 1966), p. 169.

48 Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985), pp. 191-192.

72 .

WHY HOPE?

49 Quoted in Ibid., p. 135.

50 Ibid., pp 83, 86, 99, 105.

51 Quoted in Heather Glen, Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983), p. 206.

52 E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 229.

53 Ibid., p. 114.

54 Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1970), p. 47.

55 Quoted in R.W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (London: Blandford Press,
1969), p. 178.

56 Northrup Frye, “The Drunken Boat,” in Northrup Frye, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 7.

57 Rene Wellek, “Romanticism Reconsidered,” in Frye, op.cit., p. 1 17.

58 R.W. Harris, op.cit., p. 193.

59 Quoted in Ibid., p. 288.

60 Quoted in Ibid., p. 299.

61 Quoted in Ibid., p. 361.

62 Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 133.

63 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 3.

64 A.P. Wadsworth, “The First Manchester Sunday Schools,” in Flinn and Smout, op.cit., p. 101.

65 E. Evans, op.cit., p. 54.

66 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38: 1
(1967), p. 97.

67 B. Wilson, op.cit., p. 261.

68 M.J.D. Roberts, “Public and Private in Early Nineteenth-Century London: the Vagrant
Act of 1822 and its Enforcement,” Social History 13:3 (October 1988), p. 294.

69 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700—1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 156.

70 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989), p. 45.

71 Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010), pp. 84-85.

72 David Bindman, “Prints,” in I. McCalman, op.cit., p. 209.

73 Quoted in B. Wilson, op.cit ., p. 316.

74 Tom Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity (New York: Cambridge, University Press, 2009), p. 228.

75 For example, Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Eyre and Spot-
tiswoode, 1954).

76 Clark Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1960), p. 1.

77 Quote in E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977), p. 125.

78 William Morris, News from Nowhere (New York: Routledge, 1970), p. 176.

73 .

PART II: SITUATIONS

A few observations on the current landscape, the onrushing emptiness here
in the technosphere and approaches— false and otherwise — to healing it.
Everywhere things are getting starkly worse, a state of all-consuming crisis
that needs much better examination than what’s on offer.
Better than what is generally allowed to be said.

Next What ?

N ext Nature “refers to the nature produced by hu-
mans and their technology.” The prevailing attitude
of Next Nature is “techno-optimism.”

What is the nature of this “Nature” and what
are the grounds for the optimism?

I’ll start by citing some recent technological
phenomena and what they seem to indicate about the nature and direc-
tion of our technoculture. Were already increasingly inhabitants of a
technosphere, so let’s look at some of its actual offerings.

A virtual French-kissing machine was unveiled in 2011. The Japa-
nese device somehow connects tongues via a plastic apparatus. There is
also a type of vest with sensors that transmits virtual “hugs.” From the
Senseg Corporation in Finland comes “E-Sense” technology, which rep-
licates the feeling of texture. Simulating touch itself! Are we not losing
our grounding as physical beings as these developments advance?

In some nursing homes now, the elderly are bathed in coffin-shaped
washing machines. No human touch required. And as to the mourning
process, it is now argued that online grieving is a better mode. Tess intru-
sive, no need to be physically present for the bereaved! There is an iPhone
application now available called the “baby cry app.” For those who wire
their baby’s room to be alerted when she stirs, this invention tells parents
what the baby’s cry means: hungry, wet, etc. (there are five choices). Just
think, after about two million years of human parenting, at last we have
a machine to tell us why our child is crying. Isn’t this all rather horrific?

JOHN ZERZAN

On a less emotional/interpersonal plane, there are the new cars with
GPS built in. “Turn here, turn there.” Simple skills like map-reading are
eroding, and people are losing their sense of direction and their grasp
of the geography of place. Our connection to the Earth (e.g. recogniz-
ing landmarks) diminishes further in the dematerializing techno-world.
Push a button and the sensor-equipped vehicle parks itself or avoids col-
lisions. We can be inert, skill-less pods, along for the ride.

“Some new technologies like Facebook or mobile phones can actu-
ally help people to live a more natural, tribal existence,” proclaims Next
Natures website. But how can one not notice that the more society is
dominated by technology, the less “natural” or “tribal” our existence be-
comes? In the U.S., according to many studies, people are increasingly
atomized and adrift. Levels of isolation are growing at a shocking pace.
Since the mid-1980s, for example, the average adult has 50 percent few-
er friends and visits friends less often. The number with no friends at
all has tripled since the mid-1980s. We are connected to our machines
much more than to others (or to the Earth). Facebook “friends” — often
individuals one has never even met — is a bitter joke.

Andrew Keen, a CNN writer, authored “Flow Our Mobile Phones Be-
came Frankenstein’s Monster” (February 28, 2012), about personal disem-
powerment and growing smartphone addiction. In a fragmented, isolated
techno-scape, many cling to their phones as to life rafts, but the devices
mostly connect nowhere to nowhere. Leaving aside the surveillance capabil-
ity and brain cancer threat represented by mobile phones, they are more
emblematic of an empty life-world than of anything “natural” or “tribal.”

There is a ton of research showing that Internet immersion is con-
nected to shallow, no-attention-span thinking — the inability to think
seriously or in-depth. It has been observed that children now make eye
contact much less often, as a function of the number of hours they spend
online. Ours is a more and more mediated, disembodied world in which
the face-to-face aspect keeps declining, as does direct experience itself.

“A cultural project or phenomenon turns into nature when it be-
comes potentially or entirely autonomous and uncontrollable” (Next
Nature website). If nature means, in effect, technology, then nothing

76 .

WHY HOPE?

could be further from the truth than this statement. The technological
imperative — its inner logic — is the opposite of autonomous and uncon-
trollable. Technology is born of, and always bears the stamp of domesti-
cation. From domestication of animals and plants — and of, ourselves in
the process — we entered and began to move ceaselessly along the path
of control, within the ethos of domination.

To tame or conquer is the hallmark of technology, as opposed to
the realm of tools. Domestication began about 10,000 years ago; vari-
ous commentators have called it “the worst mistake in human history.”
Domestication was the shift away from what nature more or less freely
gave us, to a colonization of nature. The Earth was put to work, and so
many negatives resulted from this fundamental turn: the objectification
of women, a life of toil, organized violence, the systematic destruction
of nature, and hierarchy, to name a few. Orthodox anthropology now
posits that an egalitarian life of sharing was traded, not without huge
resistance, for domestication and civilization.

Paul Shepard tells us that nanotechnology, cloning, genetic engi-
neering, etc. were implicit in that first step: the move into domesticated
life of ever increasing control and domination. Not exactly autonomous
or uncontrollable is the ensuing trail of technological systems. Not ex-
actly free or wild. More control, and always more work.

Technology is never separable from culture, and this relationship
is deeply revealing. A society’s technology is the physical incarnation of
that society. The primary values and choices of a culture or society can
be read in its technology.

In very early, non-complex societies we find simple tools, which
express values such as equality and autonomy. Tool-based technology
is visible, transparent, and accessible; anyone is potentially capable of
fashioning, say, stone tools. Early technological processes imply other
values such as playfulness, intimacy, and flexibility. In contrast, modern
technology expresses, generally speaking, a near total dependence on
experts, and standardization, coldness, lack of individuality.

Technology is never a neutral tool. It is rather a socio-cultural di-
mension, always political in the sense of representing choices — con-
sciously made or not. And choices are not made consciously, by the way,
when technology is thought of as neutral and non-political.

“Over time, the expanding influence of humanity on Earth has re-

77 .

placed old nature with next nature.” This formulation makes it sound
like a seamless, natural process because it leaves out the intervention of
a basic social institution. Domestication changed everything, not some
abstract “humanity.” It is social institutions, and their corresponding
technologies, that specifically impact nature.

Take population, for example. There are two pronounced spikes
in the human record: the first upon the arrival of domestication glob-
ally, and the second about two hundred years ago, with the Industrial
Revolution. These jumps in population growth, establishing ever higher
levels, correspond to the emergence of two social institutions. Some of
us argue that the solution to unnatural population growth is to remove
the two primary causal factors, domestication, and industrialism. The
call for more technology only adds to the problem since both social
institutions are necessary for the existence and growth of technology or
“Next Nature.” “Evolution goes on” — but in a bad direction.

“We are certainly as opposed to species loss, habitat destruction,
and global warming as anyone else.” But again, developing the techno-
future is based on the systematic destruction of the unbuilt world, on
global industrialization. What else enables it? The call for “increased
diversity” is completely hollow. Not only are species, languages, and in-
digenous cultures being sacrificed, the general cultural homogenization
is overtaking diversity. Increasingly, the malls, airports, apartments, et
al. become identical in a globalizing world. Techno-industrial life grows
flatter, textureless, and standardized. Perhaps most important: technol-
ogy is the same everywhere.

Is it a coincidence that as the techno-culture crowds out everything
else, we see growing pathologies in society? In the U.S., tens of millions
of people need addictive drugs to sleep, to have sex, to counter anxiety
and depression. Meanwhile the shooting sprees — rampage killings in
schools, family workplaces, and shopping malls — are daily occurrences.
The emptiness and desolation are palpable, bringing continually wors-
ening symptoms.

In today’s mass techno-society, community has all but disappeared.
And without social bonds and solidarity, anything can and does happen.
Virtual “community” is a mockery of actual, face-to-face community,
where individuals can be accountable and responsible.

Technology is forever promising solutions. We live in an age where

78 .

WHY HOPE?

technology fills an ideological vacuum, as political ideologies fade in
significance. But by and large, the solutions address problems that were
created by technology in the first place — a fact we are not supposed to
notice. (Think of diseases spread by intercontinental travel, oil spills, or
nuclear power disasters, for instance — and even those diseases that did
not exist prior to domestication, including virtually all infectious and
degenerative diseases.)

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck argues in his “risk society” the-
sis that disasters are a built-in feature of complex society. Global warm-
ing, the biggest disaster of all, evidently is a function of the growth of
global industry. The more factories, the higher the temperature. Again,
just what does onrushing technology rest upon? There is an intimate
connection between a mobile phone and the destruction, not of illusory
“Next Nature,” but of billions of years’ worth of natural systems that
have made life on Earth possible.

Fredric Jameson wrote, somewhat famously, that “Postmodernism
is what you get when the modernization process is complete and nature
is gone for good.” Postmodern culture is indeed, in my opinion, a sur-
render of this kind: let’s just accept the erasure of the natural world and
go on from there. In IBM’s watchword: “Let’s Build a Smarter Planet.”
We should accept the inevitable success of the cyber/cyborg/digital/
virtual/ information technology juggernaut, not think about what “ad-
vanced” society is really advancing toward.

But we know what the fullness of the technological project has
brought us. Since Emile Durkheim in the nineteenth century we’ve
known, for example, that modern industrial cities breed much higher
rates of suicide and madness. Reams of empirical studies and a century
or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increas-
ingly shallow and instrumental relationships, amid a life-world that is
barren and isolating.

Recently, a friend who is an emergency medical professional told
me of calls received during the holiday season, from those who don’t
have a health emergency. “I think I might be having a heart attack,” for
example, in order to get a visit — in order to have some human contact.

Do we really want to push all this even further? Life, health, free-
dom, community need a different direction.

For thousands of generations we lived in band society. Before tribal-

79 .

JOHN ZERZAN

ism, this form of community— perhaps the only actual form that has exist-
ed— featured the face-to-face society that consisted of fewer than a hundred
people. Mass society of course erased this and so much more.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1973 interview, rejected the claims of
modern techno-society, in favor of band society. “Human beings will be
happier... when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities. That’s my
utopia. That’s what I want for me.” I, too, want to go in that direction.
We need a new paradigm, a new vision, which would involve a radical de-
centralization, a move away from the ever more integrating world system.
Not alter-globalization, a new catch-phrase on the Left, but anti-globaliza-
tion based on anti- authoritarian perspectives.

More than that we need to start de-domesticating ourselves and re-
skilling ourselves. Reconnecting with the Earth in a literal sense. All of us
are domesticated but we can start the process of transition. Toward imme-
diacy, wholeness, vitality. It won’t be easy but if a growing number becomes
involved in such a move the ways and means can be found. I think that a
growing number may be feeling the need for such a new direction.

There are no blueprints. We will figure out our paths when our
goals can be seen and discussed. As we find each other, the necessary
public conversation will begin and the effort to go forward together may
ensue. No guarantees, but worth the liberating journey!

80 .

Blown Away:

Guns and “Random” Mass Shootings
— An Interview With John Zerzan

I n recent years, there have been a number of mass shootings
throughout North America, a phenomenon which is becoming
increasingly normalized in modern society. John Zerzan has writ-
ten and spoken extensively about this phenomenon of shootings,
never shying away from the difficult subjects and questions that many
others actively avoid.

Interview by Comrade Black for Profane Existence

PE: I remember you once saying on your radio show that ivhen the media
talks about mass shootings they use a set of buzzwords and often present it as
though these acts are incomprehensible. Canyon explain what you meant and
why this is problematic?

Zerzan: First, let me say that my focus has been on the unprecedented
rise in what are commonly called “random” multiple shootings; those
that, as you say, are presented as incomprehensible. Of course they are
not incomprehensible and speak to the nature of modern mass soci-
ety. They are deeply symptomatic of the growing isolation, a product of
the disappearance of community. Society becomes rapidly more tech-
nological and — contrary to the propaganda claims of the tech agenda
— people are ever more adrift and lonely. With less and less to hang on
to unspeakable things happen.

P E : Often mass shootings get blamed on mental health, yet many of these kill-
ers had no history of known mental illness?

Zerzan: Yes, most of the shooters have no history of mental illness.
More often one reads what has become a kind of cliche description: ‘he
was the quietest guy, very nice, never missed work or made trouble, etc.’

PE: A while back there was an article about kids being bored by mass shootings.
Do yon think they have become part of the spectacle ? Or are they the cracks?
Zerzan: It’s possible that as these multiple homicide acts become al-
most daily occurrences events they are tuned out or even become bor-
ing. Think what else is routinely tuned out among the common horrors
of civilization. . .

PE: I saw a feminist blogger recently ivrite that all these shootings have one
thing in common, that the perpetrators are all men. What’s your take?
Zerzan: Not all the shooters are male. A horrible part of the phenom-
enon in recent years has been family slaughters, including mothers mur-
dering their children.

PE: I have heard you say that mass shootings are a phenomenon that appears to
be unique to both the modern times and certain parts of the world? What is the
connection betiveen privilege and this type of violent act?

Zerzan: Roughly speaking, these rampage killings happen in the more tech-
nological societies and are spreading from the U.S. to other technologically
advanced countries. Thus one wonders how ‘advanced’ or ‘privileged’ these
places really are. In terms of individuals it is less often poorer people com-
mitting theses acts, more likely white suburbanites, with some exceptions.

PE: Ever since Chris Domer opened fire killing a couple cops, more people are
beginning to target the police. As an anarchist, what do you make of this?
Zerzan: Police brutality and the militarization of the cops seems to be
increasing. So, not a big surprise that more folks would strike back.

PE: Another interesting aspect of the more recent shootings, starting tvith
Domer, is that the killers used Eacebook or other social media to post statements
before committing their killings. Iam certain this ivill justify increased profiling
and surveillance. What are your thoughts on this?

Zerzan : Social media usage is of course extremely widespread so we see
more use of it by shooters e.g. the Isla Vista killer recently.

P E : Layla AbdelRahim writes about how politeness and manners area form
of civilized violence that helps to hide the violence of our society. We live in a

82 .

WHY HOPE?

horribly violent culture that pretends the violence doesn’t exist; what do you
make of these outbursts of very public violence in the spectacle of polite society?
Zerzan: Layla refers to how domestication represses the violence, if less
effectively these days, eh? The violence is less hidden than ever but de-
nial reigns and the ‘solutions’ put forth are very superficial. For example,
gun control laws which miss the basic reality. That is, guns have always
been very prevalent in this country, since colonial times in fact. But the
shooting rampages as a common phenomenon is quite recent histori-
cally. A year before Adam Lanza killed twenty-some children at a school
in Connecticut he called Anarchy Radio to tell of a chimpanzee who
attacked its owner. The chimp had been dressed in human clothes, fed
human food, provided with TV — and snapped because of the degrading
domestication it was subject to. The bitter irony was that Lanza himself
snapped and killed two dozen people about a year later.

PE: When Ted Kaczynski was arrested as the Unabomber, you wrote him
letters and visited him in jail; hoiv do his acts of violence differ from these
others? Is it simply a difference in ideology? What can we learn from “Uncle
Ted’s” actions?

Zerzan: Kaczynski’s acts were in no way random. They were part of an
exclusively anti-technology campaign.

PE: Is there a connection betiveen how we as a society treat animals and the
land with this type of violence?

Zerzan: I think it’s quite reasonable to see the mass cruelty of industri-
alized agriculture — to use a big example of how animals are treated — as
cheapening life in general and thus contributing to these explosions of
violence among humans.

PE: I remember ivhen the Columbine shooting happened which seemed to be
one of the first, follotved by another high school shooting in Taber, Alberta not far
from ivhere I grew up only a week or two later. As a kid in a high school that was
tormented and bullied nearly to the point of committing suicide myself, having
a couple kids pick up guns and shoot back was something I paid close attention
to. But things didn’t seem to get better in the afiermath; rather kids like me ivere
treated like we ivere all potential psychopaths and nothing else really changed.

83 .

Zerzan: Bullying is one triggering factor in some of the mass killings.
But bullying is nothing new whereas there is something unprecedented
going on as mass society shows such pathologies. I went to a rough high
school where, in addition to beatings by some of the priests, there was
a fair degree of bullying. No one brought a gun to school and started
blowing folks away.

PE: Fredy Perlman described civilization as a monster that keeps growing
and consuming, ivhile telling the story of people ivho either resisted by running
away until the monster caught up to them or by fighting back — often becom-
ing more like the monster they resisted in order to stop it until it collapsed and
they took its place as the new monster. Flow do we resist without becoming
recuperated into the machine ive seek to destroy ?

Zerzan: Civilization must be attacked at a deep enough level to hit
its target. Activism that lacks critique or lacks a qualitatively different
vision or paradigm is doomed to be quite limited in my opinion. This
means, among other things, that we must not shrink from embracing
property destruction, which is hard to co-opt.

PE: You have argued that technology alienates us further. Are these shootings
a sytnptom of individualism? Capitalism? Lack of nature? Or something else?
Zerzan: It’s all these things even if technology is major — and generally
overlooked. Domination is a totality and needs to be seen as such to
avoid single-issue reformism.

As Adorno put it, in terms of causes: “It is idle to search for what might
have been a cause within a monolithic society. Only that society itself
remains the cause.”

PE: You have ivritten about hope, whereas the trend seems to be moving to-
ivard nihilism. Where do you find hope in times like these?

Zerzan: I am hopeful because I see the energy of resistance alive in
many places. It has not gone away. And because I think that the system
of domination is actually quite hollow and weak. It is plainly losing the
allegiance of many on many levels, has no answers to the myriad prob-
lems it has created.

84 .

Vagaries of the Left

I n February 2012 the progressive columnist Chris Hedges caused
quite a stir with “The Cancer in Occupy” ( truthdig , February 6,
2012), a fairly predictable attack on Black Bloc militancy. Itvoiced,
in general, the perspective of the liberal-moderate-reformist folks
who have been mostly predominant in Occupy. Hedges’ screed against
anarchists and others who “go too far” shows just what anti-authoritar-
ians have been up against and why so few of them, in my experience,
have been interested in Occupy. Of course, the Occupy sites are many
and varied, it must be added.

Hedges basically counsels that if everyone behaves, then Occupy
will continue to succeed, obviously exaggerating the potency of the
movement so far. He represents voting, property-respecting, obey-the-
rules-of-the-game — unless he’s talking about somewhere else. He has
lauded rioting and resistance in Greece, for example. His “Cancer” es-
say is full of gaffes and bloopers, e.g. I am a big voice of Black Bloc,
anarchists are full of “a repellent cynicism,” etc. It has been critiqued by
many, including Peter Gelderloos, magpie, Bobby Whittenberg-James.

I wish to add only a couple of things that have been less developed,
or not mentioned by other commentators.

Hedges finds it scandalous that Green Anarchy magazine published
a brief article years ago (GA #5, Spring 2001) criticizing the Zapatista
EZLN from the anarchist perspective. As an editor of GA at the time, 1
recall that we weren’t thrilled by the piece, but we ran it in the interest
of provoking discussion. Chris Hedges is evidently not in favor of open
discussion, and neither was the EZLN, which sent us a rather chilling
response (GA #8, Spring 2002).

If it is scandalous to think critically about what is going on in Chi-
apas, it is worse, in my opinion, to fail to learn from the evidence, from
the record. Over the years I’ve seen enthusiasm for national liberation-
type movements, widely and loudly expressed, fade into silence when
such movements became governments or political parties. Do I see this
happening in southernmost Mexico? I hope not. Do 1 support their
struggles? Certainly.

But a certain silence has set in, and questions emerge. Remember
when Subcomandante Marcos renounced his urban, leftist, intellectual
past and embraced indigeneity as the necessary realm of authenticity?
Given the recent past of the EZLN, it seems like a long time ago.

In 2005 the Sixth Declaration was proclaimed by the Clandestine Rev-
olutionary Indigenous Committees — General Command of the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation. Except for the one word, does any of this
hyper-bureaucratic-sounding mouthful seem remotely indigenous? And
within this document, there are references to “our Mexico,” “our Patria.” Is
nationalism indigenous? How about such slippery terms or phrases as “The
Other Campaign,” or “we govern by obeying”? Similarly, “building another
way of doing politics, for a program of the Left and for a new constitution”?

For a leftist like Hedges, it is forbidden to wonder about the direc-
tion or nature of the EZLN.

But the bulk of “The Cancer of Occupy” consists of quoted opin-
ions of Derrick Jensen, who was once an enemy of civilization. Jensens
opening announcement is that “what they [Black Bloc types] are really
doing is destroying the Occupy movement.” BB tactics are not only
inappropriate; they are “criminal.” With his complete intolerance of
criticism, Jensen had already cut ties with anarchists. Not “officially,”
but he’s made it pretty clear to many. “I can’t stand those people,” he
wrote in a recent letter to a farmer. It took a few years, but he now
seems to be hardly distinguishable from a liberal. Hie anti-civ bit is a
distant memory, used very occasionally, qualified, and tamed. Speak-
ing of tamed, Jensen never seemed to grasp that civilization starts from
domestication. Can’t remember him ever using that word. It is, of course,
nothing short of bizarre that Deep Green Resistance, a Jensen spin-off,
calls for the physical destruction of infrastructure, while DJ recoils in
shock and horror from BB militancy. DGR has been an attractive idea
to some precisely because it is “heavy,” portends real action against the
machine. When the tactical formations of young people freak out the
likes of Jensen, one cannot miss the contradiction: felonious arsons and
bombings are called for but Black Bloc is too much (??). DGR projects
and at least one of Derrick’s recent books are subsidized by the Wallace
Fund; that’s when things get really bizarre. Major funders of NPR, and
named for iiber-progressive Henry A. Wallace, the Wallace Fund cannot
exactly be counted among our anti-civ forces!

86 .

WHY HOPE?

Of course, the strategic thinking that Jensen counsels means, 1 guess,
that the DGR will direct the resistance, not undisciplined anarchists. I
heard his DGR cohort Lierre Keith speak last year, and in a similar vein,
she expressed contempt for ELF and ALF folks, their lack of respect for
authority. They would be welcome, however, she said in as many words,
as cannon fodder for the DGR authorities, who think like “field gener-
als.” I’m not making this up.

In his column, Chris Fledges states: “Black Bloc adherents detest
those of us on the organized left.” I do detest leftists like Hedges, for
obvious reasons. Mainly because they are anti-radical and hence anti-
anarchist. That’s obvious to me. What should also be obvious is how
movements or individuals slide into what should not be acceptable.

A few days after his “Cancer” piece appeared — and a furor ensued —
Hedges gave an interview to try to calm the waters ( truthdig , February 9).
Here he admitted that it is anti-civilization and anti-Left ideas, more than
Black Bloc, that really set him off. As well they should! That colossal fail-
ure known as the Left has, of course, always been a bulwark of civilization.
The Left has reason to fear that which means its definitive end.

It should come as no big surprise, given Hedges’ progressive orienta-
tion, that he opposes anti-civ ideas. Just as it shouldn’t be a big jolt to know
that Noam Chomsky is similarly exercised by those who question such
primary institutions as domestication, civilization, industrialism and mass
society — which is fast leading to disaster in every sphere, at every level. And
neither should it be big news that Derrick Jensen is more and more a part of
the Left and its basic acquiescence in this nightmare we live in.

I was at the beginning of a three-week group speaking tour in India
when the Hedges piece broke. Let me add, perhaps as an antidote to
Hedges and Jensen, that there are now anarchist groups in India, appar-
ently for the first time. The February visit was my third in the past four
years and broke new ground — this time the venues were mostly in the
south. To learn more about the tour see www.anhilaal.com , the website
for the anti-civ, anti-work, anti-career network in South Asia.

87 .

Faster!

The Age of Acceleration

A cceleration is a key fact of human existence today. Time,
technology, and modernity are speeding up at an entirely
unprecedented rate. These categories or dimensions are be-
coming parodies of themselves.

Experience, consciousness, our sense of everything is rushed along
in a perpetual, hypermediated present — which is not a present. The now
has been banished from itself. In the technosphere phase of civilization,
our very notion of the present moment has been redefined (mostly) as
what flies by on a computer screen. Flying fragments, including us.

Even the perennial Subject-Object question (viz. is there an insu-
perable alienation between them?) seems to fade in the Age of Accelera-
tion. The subject is ever more insubstantial and disembodied; the object
maybe even more so. We are no longer so much surrounded by things as
by fleeting virtual images.

Reality seems out of control, in a runaway world. As our daily lives ac-
celerate, less and less happens to us. The power of acceleration, once thought
by some to be liberating, is far more widely felt as an enslaving pressure.

Progress “on speed,” as it were, heightens the advance of ecological
catastrophe. Nature is systematically overburdened, and of course ac-
celeration is its measure.

All of this outraces the ability of thought to come to grips with it.
Hartmut Rosa puts it this way: “I fear that we are in danger of running
out of claims, hypotheses and theories that are inspiring and challenging
for late-modern culture.” 1 Though not an acceleration theorist like Rosa,
Bruno Latour offers “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Mat-
ters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” 2

But there’s no mystery involved. Rosa himself observes that it is
“the logic of acceleration that determines the structural and cultural
evolution of modern society,” 3 and that “Progress and acceleration were
indissolubly linked together from the very beginning.” 4 It is clear that
growing social and technological complexity, boosted by increasingly
interdependent systems and exponentially more powerful computing

WHY HOPE?

capacities, constitute the racing reality of mass techno-society.

The reality is more starkly revealed the faster it goes in every sphere.
This has not meant, however, that an indictment of the whole is allowed.
Such a rejection is perhaps ever more transparently or unavoidably im-
plied, but that perspective is unlikely to be taken seriously. “From the
very beginning,” in Rosas words, is an entirely appropriate usage none-
theless. It must be noted in passing that the current nature of this ac-
celerating world is the outcome of the movement of two of the most
primary social institutions: division of labor and domestication.

Time has always been a colonizing force. It became a thing, within
us, then over us. The emergence and growth of this materiality, time
consciousness, corresponds to that of alienation because it is the most
primary estrangement. Time is neither neutral nor objective, especially
as the depth of the present gives way to the techno-present and our sense
of time is re-coded. It leaps forward with all the rest in our epoch, in
which even the speed of light, a supposedly unassailable limit, has been
surpassed. Time cracks the whip and mocks everything that doesn’t keep
up. It merges with technological existence and in countless ways pro-
claims that there is nothing outside either of these dimensions.

Time has literally speeded up. We live in a new global timescape
that Ben Agger calls “fast capitalism” and the “total administration of
time .” 5 Along with time compression goes time famine: it feels like we
never have enough time; time is running out. Time is getting more and
more scarce. Pressure and stress hound us as we struggle, relying on cof-
fee, energy drinks, and other substances to keep up . 6

The temporal trajectory has become a permanent but impoverished
present. As Baudrillard put it, “Time itself, lived time, no longer has time
to take place .” 7 Domesticated society has long been temporal in nature,
now radically so . 8 The new, post-clock age is very decontextualized, but also
shows more of the same progress of times estrangement from the Earth. The
present contracts, but is increasingly all there is. History is evaporating; the
past becomes somehow incomprehensible. Posthistoire: Has History Come to
an End ? by Lutz Niethammer poses this well enough. Herve Fischer con-
cludes, “Cybertime, our time, is tragic. It has no past, no future .” 9

There’s no time for depth, engagement, reflective action. The sym-
bolic, which started with time, completes itself as the only presence.
Fischer again: “Time has become the very matter of reality .” 111 If it is

89 .

true that oppressive time infiltrates and domesticates at a basic level, the
struggle against domination cannot overlook it.

Modern technology is precisely what alters our experience of time.
The always-faster colonization of life by technology commands an ever-
fluctuating environment in which the self is destabilized and such di-
chotomies as online-offline, public-private, and work-leisure are made
largely irrelevant. The properties of the physical self are reduced, as gal-
loping technology claims to complete and enhance them. Speed is of
the essence; computing power means one thing — how fast it is. 2014’s
Magazine of the Year award went to a tech and business zine called Fast
Company ( New York Times, May 1, 2014).

Staring at screens we become “digital interfaces,” 11 approaching a
communicative elsewhere which is nowhere. Through the always-de-
veloping devices a great indifference to the world is apparent. And why
should this be surprising, given how indifferent the world now is to us.
A world subdued and rendered uniform, ugly, and lifeless by onrushing
technology. Enlightenment modernity, its promises unrealized, is now
unrecognizable in key ways. Spengler said that modern times have been
“stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which [they] will
bear no more.” 12

The history of modernity is, on one level, a series of innovations in
ever increasing time compression. This mounting technological move-
ment is foundational to the fact that Progress is totalitarian. From ur-
banization and globalization to the disorienting virtual waves of infor-
mation, the enclosing pace is relentless.

About a century ago the futurist Marinetti declaimed, “One must
persecute, lash, torture all those who sin against speed.” 13 Fast-forward
to the present: Microsoft Cloud threatens all techno-serfs with the re-
minder that “The winning edge can boil down to nanoseconds. The
Cloud That Flelps Win the Race!” (full-page ad, New York Times, April
1, 2014). A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Stock markets around
the world now operate on this level. Paul Virilio says that “By accelerat-
ing, globalization turns reality inside out like a glove.” 14

Baudrillard stressed that reality comes to an end when real and un-
real become indistinguishable. This is the current stage of the catastrophic
nature of civilization, which is modernity. And Rosa points to the “accel-
eration process which is indiscernibly linked to the concept and essence

90 .

WHY HOPE?

of modernity.” 15 Virilio terms this “a culture of desertification,” 16 whose
constant uptick guarantees the “liquidation of the world.” 17

All of this operates against mutual and embodied co-presence; this
seems to be why (somewhat perversely) all the speeding-up has pro-
duced a big increase in sedentariness. Seated before the slight, synthetic
glow of the screen as life flies by. As people work faster, because the
machines go faster.

“Get.Arts.Fast” is William Grimes’ March 21, 2014 New York Times
offering on abbreviated theater and other performances, shortened to
fit the busy schedules of exhausted patrons, as well as their shrinking
attention spans. At least accelerating technosphere developments (e.g.
Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology) have so far not managed to keep
up with the fantasies of those who actually put their faith in them. Ray
Kurzweil’s deluded technotopian Singularity dreams get a cinematic
comeuppance in the 2014 movie Transcendence, by the way.

Somewhere Spinoza wrote that we are immortal here and now, in
each instant. And so we continue, in the face of what wants to be over-
whelming. Jean-Claude Carriere, asked how he accomplished so many
things, responded, “My reply is always the same, and I’m not trying to
be funny: ‘Because 1 do them slowly.’” 18 Gifted athletes often remark
similarly, on their ability to slow things down.

“All that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels characterized
the transforming power of industrial capitalism in The Communist Man-
ifesto. But what drives the now frantic pulse of transformation was un-
leashed far earlier. It has indeed gone into overdrive with the Industrial
Revolution, but heightening complexity under the sign of domestica-
tion is thousands of years older than modern capitalism.

“Don’t be evil” is Google’s well-known mantra, part of its mission
statement. Of course the whole mega-project, of which Google is only
the latest tiny part, is the “evil” that is now so virulent. It may appear as
the force of destiny, in which case it is time for a new conquest.

91 .

(ENDNOTES)

1 Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration (Natchitoches, LA: NSU Press, 2010), p. 7.

2 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2005.

3 Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2013), p. 279.

4 Ibid., p. 321.

5 Ben Agger, “Time Robbers, Time Rebels: Limits to Fast Capital” in Robert Hassan and
Ronald E. Purser, eds., 2417 : Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007).

6 The popular literature is of course extensive. For example: Martin Moore-Ede, The Twenty-
Four-Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Stops (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1993); Thomas Hyland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment (Sterling, VA:
Pluto Press, 2001); Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has
the Time (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2014).

7 Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 27.

8 For historical analysis see my “Beginning of Time, End of Time” in Elements ofRefiisal (Co-
lumbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999) and “Time and its Discontents” in Running on Emptiness
(Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002).

9 Herve Fischer, Digital Shock (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), p. 50.

10 Ibid., p. 49.

1 1 Arthur Kroher, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004), p. 175.

1 2 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West I (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 19.

1 3 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The New Religion vol. 1 — Morality of Speed” in Hartmut
Rosa and William E. Scheuerman, eds., High-Speed Society (University Park, PA: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 2009), p. 58.

14 Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 51.

1 5 Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, op.cit., p. 8.

1 6 Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 35.

17 Ibid., p. 52.

18 Catherine David, Frederic Lenoir, Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, eds., Conversations About the
End of Time (New York: Fromm International, 2000), p. 164.

92 .

A Word on Civilization
and Collapse

C ivilizations have come and gone over the past six thousand years
or so. Now there’s just one. Various cultures, but a single, global
civilization.

Collapse is in the air. We’ve already seen the failure, if not
the collapse, of culture in the West. The Holocaust alone, in the most cul-
tured country (philosophy, music uppermost), revealed culture’s impotence.

We have a better idea of what civilization is than we do of what col-
lapse would mean. It’s the standard notion: domestication, soon followed
by the early, major civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Domestica-
tion, the ground and thrust of civilization per se: the ethos of ever-pro-
gressing domination of nature and control in general.

“Nature has not ordained civilization; quite the contrary,” as E.J.
Applewhite aptly observed. All civilizations have been riven with tensions,
and all heretofore have failed. Mayan and Mycenaean civilizations, half
a world apart, collapsed simultaneously (if slowly). Egyptian civilization
rose and fell four times before it exhausted itself. Arnold Toynbee exam-
ined some twenty past civilizations in his massive A Study of History. He
found that in every case, the cause of collapse was internal, not external.

What may be civilization’s deepest tension is brought out in that
most radical text, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. For Freud, civili-
zation rests on a primary repression, the source of unconquerable unhap-
piness: the trading of instinctual freedom and eros for work and symbolic
culture. Thus civilization’s very foundation, domestication, is the worst of
bargains, the basic generator of neurosis. Oswald Spengler underlined the
futility of civilization, deciding that it was undesirable, even evil. For Roy
Rappaport, maladaptive was the adjective that best described it, though
he (like the rest) concluded that smaller, self-sufficient social orders would
be as undesirable as they would be impossible to achieve.

In The Decline of the West, Spengler noted that the last phases of every
civilization are marked by increasing technological complexity. This is strik-
ingly true of planetary culture today, when we also see technology’s claims
and promises tending to displace those of explicitly political ideology.

William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail out-
lines quite ably the reasons why civilizational failure is inevitable, why
the grasping control ethos of domestication comes to its self-defeating
end. The book’s first sentence also serves very well to announce the fatal
illusion that prevails today: “Modern civilization believes it commands
the historical process with technological power.”

1 believe that the fallacy of this belief is becoming clearer to more
people. After all, as Jared Diamond put it, “All of our current problems
are unintended consequences of our existing technology.” In fact, civi-
lization is failing on every level, in every sphere, and its failure equates
so largely with the failure of technology. More and more, this is what
people understand as collapse.

Complex societies are recent in human history, and certainly this
overarching civilization is very different from all that have gone before.
The main differences are twofold. Reigning civilization now dominates
the entire globe, various cultural differences notwithstanding; and tech-
nological invasiveness colonizes to an undreamed-of degree.

Despite this reach and height, the rule of civilization is based on
less and less. Inner nature is as ravaged as outer nature. The collapse
of human connectedness has opened the door to unimaginable phe-
nomena among lonely human populations. The extinction of species,
melting polar ice, vanishing ecosystems, etc. proceed without slowing.
Even rather more prosaic aspects of civilization are in decline. Rappa-
port found that as civilizational systems “become increasingly large and
powerful the quality and utility of their products are likely to deterio-
rate.” The massive mid-2014 recall of millions of GM, Toyota, and Ford
cars comes to mind. Jared Diamond pointed out that “steep decline may
begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers.”

Enter Peak Oil and its prediction that oil is beginning to run out,
signaling the finale of industrial civilization and its ruinous run. The
discovery of large reserves of natural gas and new technological processes
(e.g. shale gas extraction) may, however, mean that the Peak Oil projec-
tion of terminal decline won’t begin for many decades. The Oil Drum
website, a major Peak Oil forum, went silent in 2008 after an eight-year
run, admitting to lack of interest.

There is an understandable, if misplaced, desire that civilization will
cooperate with us and deconstruct itself. This mindset seems especially

94 .

WHY HOPE?

prevalent among those who shy away from resistance, from doing the
work of opposing civilization. There is also a tendency to see a dramatic
showdown looming, even though history rarely seems to provide us with
such a scenario.

Things are dire, and worsening. So we also see more and more pes-
simism and even surrender, although the former does not always lead to
the latter. There will be no big happy ending, counsels the anonymously
penned 2011 offering Desert. It tells us that the picture of a single global
present is an illusion, mirrored by the illusion of a single, global liber-
ated future. But as civilization moves steadily toward a unitary, global-
ized, highly integrated reality, the first assertion looks demonstrably in
error. As for the second, we have no idea what will happen; nonetheless
it seems self-evident that either we will overcome the domestication/
civilization paradigm or we won’t. Not that the struggle will likely be
decided in one fell swoop.

Desert presents much in terms of the limits of activism, but is that
where all will be decided? The book provides little or no analysis or vi-
sion, so ignores what may be crucial: legitimation. 1 think we are already
seeing signs of de-legitimation as awareness grows that civilization is
doomed, and civilizations loyalists have no answers to a widening crisis.
Things get worse, and civilization makes things worse. It is failing, and
we have crucial questions and understanding as to why.

More importantly, a qualitatively different paradigm or vision is
possible, and even available. It is not surprising that Desert puts forth a
lifeboat approach, however unrealistic overall, or that Dark Mountain’s
Paul Kingsworth, well-known UK environmentalist, flat-out throws in
the towel. It looks bad, but civilization’s prospects increasingly look even
worse: no future. We need to put forth the effort to bring it to an end.
The direction is clear: “a return to the normal human condition of lower
complexity,” in the words of Joseph Tainter ( The Collapse of Complex So-
cieties). Toward life, health, community, a face-to-face world of robust,
re-skilled individuals.

95 .

PART

INSPIRATIONS

There is much to draw on in our struggle to live and to overcome the
disease of civilization. The wonderful mystery of non-human animals,
consciousness, and the sea, for example. The totality is increasingly,
transparently, a death march. Life is so clearly elsewhere
and available for new and better ventures!

Animal Dreams

T his is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of
separateness from the Earth grows and we are meant
to forget our animality. But we are animals and we co-
evolved, like all animals, in rapport with other bodily
forms and aspects of the world. Minds as well as senses
arise from embodiment, just as other animals conveyed
meaning — until modernity, that is.

We are the top of the food chain, which makes us the only animal
nobody needs. Hamlet was very much off the mark in calling humans
“the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” Mark Twain was
much closer: “the only animal that blushes. Or needs to .” 1 The life form
that is arguably least well adapted to reality, that has weaker chances for
survival among the at least ten million animal (mostly insect) species.
Humans are among the very few mammals who will kill their own kind
without the provocation of extreme hunger . 2

The human species is unique but so is every other species. We differ
from the rest no more, it seems, than do other species from each other.
Non-human animals have routinely amazing facilities for accomplishing
things by acting on information they receive from their environments.
They are creatures of instinct, but so are we. As Joseph Wood Krutch
asked, “who is the more thoroughly acquainted with the world in which
he lives ?” 3 Adaptation to one’s world is a cognitive process. If we wonder
which species is the smartest, the best answer is, most likely: they all are.

I think that Henry Beston is beautifully helpful: “We patronize them
for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far
below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall
not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours
they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we
have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” 4

In the 1980s I knew someone who signed his excellent anti-author-
itarian writings and flyers “70 animals.” That kind of identification has
charmed me ever since. In rather a contrary spirit is the long-prevailing
ban on that act of appropriation and greatest sin, anthropomorphism.
Correcting this desperate error means that “A monkey cannot be an-
gry: it exhibits aggression. A crane does not feel affection; it displays
courtship or parental behavior. A cheetah is not frightened by a lion; it
shows flight behavior.” 5 Why not take this kind of reductive approach
even further and simply remove animals from our vocabulary? This is
already underway, if the Oxford Junior Dictionary is any indication. The
2009 edition added several techno words like Twitter and mp3, while
the names of various animals, trees, etc. had been deleted. 6 Children
(and others) have less and less contact with nature, after all.

But there is no substitute for direct contact with the living world, if
we are to know what it is to be living. Our own world shrinks and shriv-
els, cut off from animal culture, from the zones of that shared, learned
behavior. What Jacob Uexkiill called the Umwelt, the universe known
to each species. We need to be open to the community of our begin-
nings and to the present non-human life-world.

Amphibians have been here for 300 million years, birds for 150
million years. Dragonflies ask no more of the biosphere than they did
one hundred million years ago, while Homo species, around for not
much more than three million years, are the only animals that are —
since domestication and civilization — never satisfied, always pursuing
new wants.

Might it not be that nature is for the happiness of all species, not
just one? 7 We sense something like this as we search for oases of wildness
in the vacuum of civilization.

“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. 8

We have mainly lost the sense of the presence or aura of animals,
of those who inhabit their bodies so wholly, fully. People in traditional

98 .

WHY HOPE?

indigenous cultures have not lost that awareness. They feel their kinship
with all who live. Some of the bond remains even with us, however, and
may be seen in small ways — our instinctive love of songbirds, for example.

All is not sweetness and light in the non-human realm either, espe-
cially in this shaken and disturbed world. Rape has been observed among
orangutans, dolphins, seals, bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds,
although it is not the norm in any of these species. 9 But even in animal
societies marked by male power, females generally remain self-sufficient
and responsible for their own sustenance, unlike in most human (do-
mesticated) societies. In some groupings, in fact, females provide for all.
Lionesses do the hunting in their prides, for example. 10 Each elk herd is
led by a cow, wise in the ways of coyote, wolf, lynx, cougar, and human.
And it is also the case, according to many, that non-humans can be as
individually distinct as we are. Delia Akeley concluded that “apes and
monkeys vary in their dispositions as much as do human beings,” 11 and
Barry Lopez commented on the “markedly different individual person-
alities” of wolves. 12 But one does see an absence of many old, infirm,
and diseased animals among non-domesticates. How the “food chain”
operates here brings up questions such as, do wolves only kill animals
that are near their end anyway — the old, sick, injured? This seems to be
roughly the case, according to Lopez. 13

Hierarchy and dominance among other species is a long-running
assumption, often a baseless one. The idea that there is usually, if not
always, a “pecking order” derives from a Norwegian graduate student in
1922. His concept came from observing domestic chickens in his back
yard and spread virulently in the animal studies field. It is a classic ex-
ample of projecting from human domestication where, of course, hier-
archy and dominance are indeed the rule. Its universality unravels with
the fact that poultry yard pecking orders are not observed in wild flocks.

Similar is the fallacy that the Freudian paradigm of murderous
rivalry between fathers and sons represents the state of nature. Ques-
tionable in the first application; even more so, evidently, regarding
non-humans. Masson and McCarthy refer to zebra, kiwi, beaver, wolf,
and mongoose fathers exhibiting acceptance and affection toward their
offspring. 14 South American muriqui monkeys, female and male, are
non-aggressive, tolerant and co-operative. Steve Kemper’s “No Alpha
Males Allowed” focuses on Karen Strier’s work with the muriqui, which

99 .

JOHN ZERZAN

subverts the dominant view of male primates. 15 Among Asian gibbons,
primates that live in pairs, the male may stay with his mate a very long
time after sexual activity has ceased. 16

John Muir described a goose attacking a hunter in support of a
wounded companion: “Never before had 1 regarded wild geese as dan-
gerous, or capable of such noble self-sacrificing devotion.” 17 Geese mate
monogamously and for life.

Widespread among non-humans are the social traits of parental care,
co-operative foraging, and reciprocal kindness or mutual aid. Mary Midg-
ley, in sum, referred to “their natural disposition to love and trust one
another.” 18 Also, to love and trust others, such as humans, to the point of
raising them. Jacques Graven, in a striking finding, refers to children hav-
ing been adopted by wolves, bears, gazelles, pigs, and sheep. 17

In his irresistible Desert Solitaire, the cantankerous Edward Abbey
imagines that the frogs he hears singing do so for various practical pur-
poses, “but also out of spontaneous love and joy.” 20 N.J. Berrill declared:
“To be a bird is to be alive more intensely than any other living crea-
ture, man included. . .they live in a world that is always the present, and
mostly full of joy.” 21 To Joseph Wood Krutch it seemed that we have
seen our capacity for joy atrophy. For animals, he decided, “joy seems to
be more important and more accessible than it is to us.” 22

Various non-human intelligences seem lately to be much more highly
regarded than in the past. John Hoptas and Kristine Samuelsons Tokyo
Waka, a 2013 documentary film, looks at resourceful urban crows. How
they use their beaks to shape twigs into hooks to snag grubs from trees, for
example. In 2002, a New Caledonia crow named Betty was declared by an
Oxford University researcher to have been the first animal to create a tool
for a specific task without trial and error, something primates have evidently
yet to achieve. Elephants’ actions, according to J.H. Williams, are “always
revealing an intelligence which finds impromptu solutions for difficulties.” 23

More surprising is what is coming to light about animals we usually
consider to be further down the “food chain.” Katherine Harmon Cour-
age has uncovered heretofore unseen capacities of the octopus. “It can
solve mazes, open jars, use tools. It even has what seems to be a sophisti-
cated inner life.” Courage goes on to state that the octopus “has a brain
unlike that of almost any creature we might think of as intelligent.” 24
Along these lines is a growing interest in “cold-blooded cognition,” with

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WHY HOPE?

recent studies revealing that reptile brains are not as undeveloped as we
imagined. Lizards and tortoises, for instance, have exhibited impressive
problem-solving capabilities . 25

Jacques Graven was amazed to learn that the method of solving
a maze is “scarcely different for a roach than for a rat,” and that strik-
ing achievements by mammals “reappear in almost identical form in in-
sects .” 26 Speaking of mazes and the like, it may be added that very little
of important truth is to be found in controlled laboratory experiments,
whichever species may be subjected to them.

Memory is important to many creatures as an aid to survival. The work
of animal scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa demonstrates that chimpanzees have
far stronger memories than humans . 27 Katydids have a hearing range many
times that of ours. Honeybees can see ultraviolet light, invisible to us. The
ichneumon fly can smell through solid wood. A monarch butterfly’s sense
of taste is two hundred times as sensitive as the human tongue. The dung
beetle finds its way with reference to the Milky Way. Animals with four
legs, and who don’t wear shoes, probably pick up on a variety of emanations
or vibrations lost on us. How about pet dogs or cats who are separated by
hundreds of miles from their host families, and somehow find them? Only
a kind of telepathy could account for the very many such cases.

A great deal more could be said about the gifts of animals. Or about
their play. It is not “anthropomorphic” to recognize that animals play.
Consider the mating dances of birds. I have seen the wonderful dawn
dances of the sandhill crane. They dance, and have inspired an endless
list of human societies. What of wild geese, whose matchless grace, el-
egance and devotion put us humans to shame?

Individuals of many species operate on an awareness that there is
a distinction between “self” and “non-self.” A member of one species
can always recognize another of the same species. These kinds of self-
recognition are obvious. Another instance is that of grizzly bears hiding
out of sight of humans and others. There is a consciousness that the
whole body — the “self” if you will — must be concealed.

But do non-humans realize that they are “selves”? Do they have self-
awareness such that they realize their mortality? Many posit an absence
of self-reflection and make this supposed absence the primary dividing
line between humans and all other animals. Bees use signs, but are not
conscious of their signing. On what basis, however, can we make as-

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JOHN ZERZAN

sumptions about what bees or other animals know or do not know?
Chimpanzees and orangutans recognize themselves in a mirror; gorillas
cannot. What exactly does this reveal?

There is quite a set of unresolved questions, in fact, as to how con-
scious or unconscious human behavior is, especially in light of the fact
that consciousness in ourselves is such a completely elusive thing. The
complex, versatile, and adaptive responses we see as a rule among the liv-
ing on this planet may or may not be guided by self-awareness. But self-
awareness is not likely an all-or-nothing phenomenon. The differences
between humans and others have not been established as radical; they
are probably more a matter of degree. More fundamentally, we do not
know how to even comprehend consciousnesses different from our own.

Our concept of self-awareness, vague though it is, seems to be the
gold standard for evaluating non-humans. The other watershed condi-
tion is that of language: are we the only species that possess it? And these
two benchmarks are commonly run together, in the assumption that con-
sciousness can only be expressed by means of language. It is tempting
to see in language the explanation for consciousness, to wonder whether
the latter is only applicable to language-using beings. Indeed it can seem
very difficult to think about the state of our minds without recourse to
language. But if language were the only basis of a thinking order, all non-
human animals would live in a completely disordered world, after all.

Wolves, dogs, dolphins, elephants, whales, to name a few, can vo-
calize at about the range of human registry. Humpback whale “songs”
are complex intra-species forms of cultural expression across vast dis-
tances. It may be that animals’ calls are, overall, more a matter of doing
than of meaning.

If we look for our kind of symbolic meaning, it does not seem to be
sustained among our fellow animals. In their natural state, parrots never
imitate the human voice; species that may be seen to draw in captivity
do not do so in the wild. Primates trained to master language do not
use it like humans. Herbert Terrace, once a convinced ape-language re-
searcher, became one of its harshest critics. Trying to wrest “a few tidbits
of language from a chimpanzee [who is] trying to get rewards,” says Ter-
race, produces nothing much of importance . 28

Animals don’t do what humans do via speech, namely, make a sym-
bol stand in for the thing . 29 As Tim Ingold puts it, “they do not impose

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WHY HOPE?

a conceptual grid on the flow of experience and hence do not encode
that experience in symbolic forms.” 30 An amazing richness of signaling,
of the most varied kinds, does not equate to symbolizing. When a crea-
ture presents its intentional acts, it does so without the need to describe
them, to re-present them.

The poet Richard Grossman found that truth is “the way it tells
itself.” 31 Jacques Lacan saw the orientation toward representation as a
lack; the animal is without the lack that constitutes the human subject.
At the heart of nature, wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, are the values “as
yet uncaptured by language;” he added that the quality of cranes lies
“beyond the need of words.” 32

I’ve long wondered how it is that so many animals look you in the
eye. What do they mean by it? Gavin Maxwell enjoyed the “wondering
inquisitiveness” of the eyes of Canadian porpoises, 33 while Dian Fossey’s
Gorillas in the Mist is filled with examples of gorillas and humans gazing
on one another in trust. John Muir wrote of Stickeen, an Alaskan dog
with whom Muir survived a life-threatening situation, “His strength of
character lay in his eyes. They looked as old as the hills, and as young,
and as wild.” 34 John Lane was drawn by the eyes of alligators, an expe-
rience “not to be forgotten. Their black eyes hold steady as if staring
through millions of miles or years.” 35

Maybe there’s more to be learned there, in those direct windows, in
that openness and immediacy, than by means of quite possibly unanswer-
able questions about consciousness and language. And if we could some-
how see with those eyes, would it possibly allow us to really see ourselves?

There is an unmediated openness about the eyes. Death may be
mentioned here, as perhaps the least mediated experience, or certainly
among them. Loren Eiseley, near his own end, felt that wild things die
“without question, without knowledge of mercy in the universe, know-
ing only themselves and their own pathway to the end.” 36 Ernest Seton-
Thompson’s Biography of a Grizzly (1901) contains much about death.
Today we are ever more distanced from encountering the reality of
death — and animals. As our lives shrink, Thoreau’s words from 1859 are
all the more true: “It seems as if no man had ever died in America; for
in order to die you must first have lived.” 37 One need only add, it isn’t
humans who know how to die, but the animals.

As if in acknowledgment, humans have exacted a revenge on selected

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species. Domestication is a kind of death, forcing animal vitality into a
subjugated state. When animals are colonized and appropriated, both do-
mesticated and domesticators are qualitatively reduced. It is the proverbial
“greatest mistake in human history” for all concerned. The direct victims,
once quite able to take care of themselves, lose autonomy, freedom of
movement, brain size, and what Krutch called the “heroic virtues .” 38

A farm pig is almost as much a human artifact as the farmer’s tractor.
Compare to a wild boar. Wild means free. To John Muir, wild sheep rep-
resented conditions before the Fall; conversely, he decided, “If a domestic
sheep was any indication, Man’s work had been degrading for himself and
his charges .” 39 The level of an animal’s perfection, as Nietzsche saw it, was
their “degree of wildness and their power to evade domestication .” 40 In light
of the vast picture of oppression, David Nibert calls the institution “domes-
ecration,” and it is not surprising that objections have been raised against
even using the same name for wild and domestic members of a species.

Industrialism of course brought far worse lives on a mass scale, mass
misery to feed mass society. Zoos and marine parks showcase further
slavery, a fitting complement to the captivity at large. As the unbuilt,
unmassified world recedes, the line between undomesticated and do-
mesticated has blurred. Pretty much everything requires managing, up
to and including the oxymoron “wildlife management.” We are now in
fact in a new age of domestication, including an unprecedented escala-
tion of controlled animal breeding in recent decades . 41

The completely non-biocentric, humanist myth of immortality is
part of the ethos of domestication, its rituals focused on sacrifice rather
than on the freedom of pre-domesticated life. Freud’s Oedipal fam-
ily model is a product of jointly domesticated animals and the father.
Lacan’s formulations often stem from findings about caged animals, and
Kristeva’s notion of abjection or disturbing threat, at base, refers to the
act of domesticating. But the non-domesticated do not participate in
assimilation into the conquered whole, in Freudian terms or otherwise.

Once there was a communal life of organisms in an ecosystem. Life
fed on life, but not in a destructive trajectory. Even now we should not
forget that the victory of domestication is far from total. Many species,
for various reasons, are outside its orbit. “The lion tamer doesn’t actually
tame anything,” John Harrington reminds us. He must stay within the
boundaries the cats have established . 42

104 .

WHY HOPE?

“Almost everything about whales is a tantalizing mystery” concluded
Diane Ackerman. 43 Wendell Berry quotes his daughter in his poem, “To
the Unseeable Animal”: “I hope there’s an animal somewhere that nobody
has ever seen. And I hope nobody ever sees it.” 44 Do we need to know,
can we know, so much about other animals? Maybe what we need most
to know is that we could possibly join them in their non-domestication.

Kant was grievously wrong about human superiority. “As the single
being on earth that possesses understanding, he is certainly titular lord
of nature.” 45 Walt Whitman provides a simple response: “Do not call the
tortoise unworthy because she is not something else.” 46 It is noteworthy
that women dominate what is called animal ethology, and are far less
prone to follow Kant’s wrongheadedness.

The illusion of human domination of the natural world comes in many
forms. One is the assumption that our prowess gives us long-range safety;
we forget that this orientation can lead us into danger in the long run. Our
lost connection, our lost awareness have led us into an age of horrors of
every kind. And as Olaus Murie once said, “In the evolution of the human
spirit, something much worse than hunger can happen to a people.” 47

Jacques Derrida came to see the prime importance of the question
of animality for humans, as pivotal to “the essence and future of human-
ity.” 48 The image of a free animal initiates a daydream, the starting point
from which the dreamer departs. Meanwhile the living reality, the com-
munion among species, yet manage to survive. The Inupiat Eskimo and
Gwich’in people, who still travel without maps and discern direction
without compasses, know that the caribou carry a piece of them in their
hearts, while they carry the caribou in their hearts. 49

The counsel of immediacy, of direct connection, has not been ex-
tinguished. “But ask now the beasts/ And they shall teach thee;/ And
the fowls of the air / And they shall teach thee;/ Or speak to the Earth/
And it shall teach thee.” (Job 12: 7—8) In the Arctic Jonathan Waterman
moved away from separation, from domestication: “I first removed my
watch. My ability to isolate different and unidentifiable smells became
incredibly distracting. My hearing seemed to improve.” 50 Far from the
Arctic, traces of this dimension have always been felt. Melville sensed
in the sight of a sperm whale a colossal existence without which we are
incomplete. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s use of animal vocabularies
and inter-species relations.

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JOHN ZERZAN

Something whole, something unbroken, there millions of years be-
fore Homo showed up. Bequeathing to us what Henry Beston Sheahan
called our “animal faith,” which he saw being destroyed by the Machine
Age . 51 We are lost, but other animals point to the right road. They are
the right road.

We lack that state of grace, but we do know how much is in danger.
Laurie Allman, taking in a Michigan songbird: “I can tell in a glance
that he does not know he is endangered. He knows only that his job is
to sing, this day, from the top of that young jack pine. His beak is open,
full of the sky behind him .” 52

Here are Richard Grossman’s lines in favor of a return to the old joy:

We shall forge
a change of mind
and come to understand
the spirit as animal . 53

We are still animals on the planet, with all its original messages
waiting in our being.

106 .

WHY HOPE?

[ENDNOTES)

1 Quoted in Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), p. 70.

2 Konrad Lorenz, The Waning of Humaneness (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987), p. 70.

3 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 83.

4 Henry Beston, The Outermost House (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), p. 25.

5 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep (New York:
Delacorte Press, 1995), p. 34. Among other works that indicate a shift away from anti-
“anthropomorphism” are Ruth Rudner, ask now the beasts (New York: Marlowe & Com-
pany, 2006) and How Forests Think (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

6 Eoin O’Carroll, “Oxford Junior Dictionary Dropping ‘Nature’ Words,” Christian Science
Monitor , February 9, 2009.

7 An ugly leftist counter-notion is communist Oxana Timofeeva, History of Animals: An Essay
on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), with
Foreword by Slavoj Zizek. Timofeeva condemns nature’s resistance to technology while
bizarrely claiming that animals are natural communists! E.g. pp. 146—147.

8 Quoted in Susan Hanson, Icons of Loss and Grace (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press,
2004), p. 182.

9 Masson and McCarthy, op.cit., p. 140.

1 0 Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 115.

1 1 Vera Norwood, Made Fom This Earth (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1993), p. 235.

1 2 Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner Classics, 2004), p. 18.

13 Ibid., p. 55.

14 Masson and McCarthy, op.cit., p. 72.

1 5 Steve Kemp, “No Alpha Males Allowed,” Smithsonian, September 2013, pp. 39-41.

1 6 Noske, op.cit., p. 1 16.

17 John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1912), p. 151.

18 Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 131.

1 9 Jacques Graven, Non-Human Thought (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), p. 68.

20 Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Ballantine Books,
1971), p. 157.

2 1 Quoted in Joseph Wood Krutch, The Great Chain of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany, 1956), p. 224.

22 Ibid., p. 227.

23 J.H. Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), p. 58.

24 Katherine Harmon Courage, “Alien Intelligence,” Wired, October 2013, p. 84.

25 Emily Anthes, “Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid,” New York Times, November 19,
2013, pp. D1,D5.

26 Graven, op.cit., p. 127.

27 Justin McCurry, “Chimps Are Making Monkeys Out of Us,” The Observer, September
28, 2013.

28 Quoted in Stephen Budiansky, If a Lion Could Talk (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 45.

29 Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2008), p. 186.

30 Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 986), p. 311.

31 Richard Grossman, “The Truth,” in Animals (Minneapolis: Zygote Press, 1983), p. 421.

107 .

JOHN ZERZAN

32 Leopold, op. tit., p. 102.

33 Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 201 1), p. 45

34 Edwin Way Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1954), p. 281.

35 John Lane, Waist Deep in Black Water (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), p. 49.

36 Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 173.

37 Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837—1861, ed. Damion Searls (New York: New York
Review of Books, 2009), p. 585 (entry for October 22, 1859).

38 Krutch, op. tit., p. 102.

39 Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 173, 176.

40 Jennifer Ham, “Taming the Beast,” in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts
(New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 158.

41 Clive Roots, Domestication (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), p. xii.

42 Quoted in Lane, op. tit., p. 125.

43 Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whale Light (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 112.

44 Wendell Berry, “To the Unseeable Animal,” in Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street,
eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013), p. 178.

45 Immanuel Kant, trans. J.C. Meredith, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1952), Part 2, Section 431.

46 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Library of America, 2011), section 13.

47 Quoted in Jonathan Waterman, Where Mountains Are Nameless (New York: W.W. Norton,
2005), p. 237.

48 Quoted in Leonard Lawlor, This is Not Sufficient (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), p. 7.

49 Waterman, op. tit., p. 212.

50 Ibid., p. 10.

51 John Nelson, “Henry Beston Sheahan,” Harvard Magazine, September/October 2013, p. 40.

52 Laurie Allman, Far From Tame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 73.

53 Grossman, op. tit., “The New Art,” p. 2.

108 .

Losing Consciousness

W e might say that the three most momentous overall
events have been the Big Bang, the emergence of life,
and the arrival of consciousness. In terms of the third,
everyone has a general notion as to what is meant. Very
familiar — but elusive. In fact, consciousness has been called “the last
surviving mystery .” 1

What exactly is consciousness? How does it come about? What does
“consciousness” mean? Saying what constitutes jazz is a parallel slippery
one. Hence the line, “If you gotta ask, you’re never gonna know.” The
Oxford Guide to Philosophy puts it simply: “Consciousness exists, but it
resists definition .” 2

It may be said to be perception of the inner environment or the im-
mediacy of self-awareness. It is something so very central and yet, as Ray-
mond Tallis asserts, most of what we do “can be carried out at least as well,
and probably better ” 3 without it. A pop culture fascination with zombies
comes to mind, with at least one attendant question: with the frightening
reality we face, is it any wonder that many would rather have less con-
sciousness? In any case we certainly aren’t zombies. Unlike them we seem
to be mainly animated by ourselves, by a mysterious interior force.

Not forgetting the wound at the heart of present-day conscious-
ness. The million or more young Japanese, for example, who suffer from
what is called hikikimori, a kind of IT autism/withdrawal. The techno
world is now our backdrop for any exploration of consciousness.

Nothing can be more real than our own consciousness, even if
nothing is more difficult to spell out. It is so close to what it means to be
alive. Thus it is hard to take seriously the claim of some neuroscientists
that it is nothing more than the noise neurons make, an illusion. But
Colin Tudge wonders how something that isn’t conscious could some-
how have illusions . 4 Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Tike to Be a Bat ?” 5
brings to mind consciousness as tied to our basic sense of ourselves.

Not only is there no accepted definition of our subject, “it is impos-
sible,” according to Stuart Sutherland in The International Dictionary of
Psychology, “to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Noth-

ing worth reading has been written about it.” s In this vein, John Horgan
noted that there are those who think that “consciousness might never be
completely explained in conventional scientific terms — or in any terms,
for that matter .” 7

Evidently what gives meaning to existence cannot supply meaning
to itself. Without it nothing can be understood and yet consciousness re-
mains an unanswered question, a profound and possibly eternal mystery.
In terms of its emergence, for example, how could it speak to what was
present in its absence, prior to consciousness? We know, after all, nothing
but what consciousness puts there. It is impossible to reveal what it is by
coming from the outside because there is no outside. The very effort to
do so is something that is inside consciousness. As Ronald Chrisley put it,
the difficulty is “not just that we don’t have an objective understanding of
this or that token instance of experience, but that we don’t know how we
could have an objective understanding of [that] experience at all .” 8

Freud was so very puzzled by consciousness that he turned almost
entirely to the unconscious. It is also true, however, that in the field of
philosophy of mind the literature on consciousness outstripped that on
any other topic by two thousand. Locke said that consciousness is “the
perception of what passes in a man’s own Mind .” 5 It is the realm of the
knower being aware of their knowledge. But doesn’t this beg the ques-
tion? What exactly is such “perception” or “being aware”?

Consciousness may not be a single entity, but that which varies in
kind as well as degree. Is it an entity? Brains are made of things, but is
consciousness made of anything? It is not anything other than itself. It
is unique and private, utterly first-person, and more than that. There
seems to be a bedrock, bare-bones, nothing-but element or dimension
somewhere in there, as well ....

“Considered as to its specific nature, consciousness is a domain
closed in itself, a domain into which nothing can enter and from which
nothing can escape,” wrote Aron Gurwitsch . 10 Sounds more like a black
hole than our general sense of it. “No matter what theory we come up
with,” assayed Colin McGinn, “it always seems to run into some shat-
tering difficulty .” 11 Michael Frayn concluded, “Without it nothing can
be understood; about it nothing can be said .” 12

We might look at a non-complex organism, one without a ner-
vous system, as “conscious” insofar as it reacts, to, say, a change in tem-

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WHY HOPE?

perature or a need for nutrients. But of course it is not self-conscious;
it lacks a feeling of autonomy, among other things. For us, conscious-
ness is the living nerve of the self, a mineness, what it feels like to be a
particular kind of being. There is a unity of selfness capable of grasping
oneself as oneself.

Consciousness of one’s life is the background for all the other ex-
periencing, while not forgetting the physical embodiment of it all. And
a basic puzzle remains. Raymond Tallis noticed that “the harder the ‘I’
looks, the less there is to find that seems to be the ‘I,’ to be what the T
is .” 13 What we are trying to comprehend is the me that is trying to com-
prehend it. The poet Anna Hampstead Branch cut to the chase: “What
are we? I know not .” 14

Meanwhile, postmodernist thinking has done its best to deflate
any claims to self-identity. Postmodernism marginalizes consciousness
by asserting that it and the self are fundamentally no more than effects
of language. The idea that language produces consciousness (cf. Emile
Beneviste) is related to its corollary propositions, e.g. the denial of inten-
tions and even of the presence of the speaker in speech (cf. Derrida), and
the denial of the originality and coherence of the author.

Not only are these positions total surrender to the totalizing es-
trangement of the symbolic, they exhibit an ignorance of human de-
velopment. Consciousness almost certainly preceded language by many
thousands of years. We know that very significant human intellectual ca-
pacities are roughly a million years older than evidence of any symbolic
ethos. And would not cognitive abilities necessarily predate language?
How else could it be explained? Hence to claim that language causes
consciousness puts the sequence plainly in the wrong order. There is also
abundant case-by-case evidence that consciousness persists in individu-
als who have been deprived of language function.

Tanguage does not create consciousness, and yet it is true that it is a
hugely pervasive, confining presence. As Wittgenstein described, “A pic-
ture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it for it lay in our
language and language seemed to repeat it to us repeatedly .” 15 Robert
Bly celebrates the captivity, missing Wittgensteins point entirely: “I say,
praise to the first man or woman who wrote down. . .joy clearly, for we
cannot remain in love with what we cannot name .” 16 The dependence
on language is pointing at the moon and seeing instead the finger.

111 .

JOHN ZERZAN

Laura Riding asked, “What were we, then, /Before the being of our-
selves began?” 17 That beginning of consciousness seems to be much earlier
than is commonly thought. As an artifact of human culture it necessarily
arose in band society, our face-to-face hunter-gatherer mode of being for
two million years or more, well over 95 percent of our tenure as a human
species. It was assumed, moreover, that band society was based on kinship;
that is, less a matter of conscious choice than the fact of being related to
each other. Now there is strong evidence that this was not the case. 18 We
were evidently self-aware selectors of our social and cultural attributes for
much longer than was previously thought. In this vein, Paul Radin’s work
among Winnebago people showed him their reflective, individualistic
qualities, which completely discredit the views ofTylor, Levy-Bruhl, Cas-
sirer, and others who viewed “primitives” as pre-conscious, pre-logical. 19

Raymond Tallis saw “no evolutionary reason... why there should
be consciousness at all.” 20 Domestication of animals, plants, and our-
selves in the bargain enters the picture about 10,000 years ago, and we
might ponder its impact upon human consciousness. It is clear that
non-human animals that are domesticated exhibit juvenilization or ar-
rested development (cf. Lodewijk Bolk). Konrad Lorenz concluded in
the 1960s that we also degenerate under domestication. There is a basis
for what Roger Caras observed as our ambivalence about our own do-
mesticated nature. 21 Cut off from a condition of intellectual freedom
and unmediated connection to the natural world, ours is a place of less-
ened conscious range and acuity, almost certainly. Nietzsche frequently
lamented the suppression of instinct, which is now even more evident
in our increasingly deskilled and self-doubting existence. Now we find
complete dependence on experts, and machines to replace the most ba-
sic conscious capacities. 22 Imagine: after so many thousands of genera-
tions we are now reaching the point where we need a machine to tell
us what our infant needs. Domesticated consciousness moves forward,
suppressing and eroding what we always knew.

William James held consciousness to be an awareness of the fleeting
present, created and sustained by memory of the past and anticipation
of the future. 23 That doesn’t tell us, however, just what that awareness
is or where it came from. It is also a formulation for a specific time and
place; it relates to what Matthew Arnold called “this strange disease of
modern life.” 24 The “fleeting” present, the “anticipation” of the future

112 .

WHY HOPE?

are vivid for us, but they may have been missing altogether when the
present did not flee before us and the future didn’t need to be a matter
of anticipation. Lacans fatalistic ethic of the body comes to mind here.
He describes a structure of anticipation in which the self is destined to
fail , 25 fitting for an age of anxiety and foreboding.

In a context where experience is negative and threatening, con-
sciousness is altered. Now it becomes useful to block out, not to open.
Walter Benjamin referred to the role of consciousness vis-a-vis an often
traumatic reality: “...the shock is thus cushioned, parried by our con-
sciousness .” 26 Benjamin’s colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer saw that
thinking has largely become “instrumental reason” under the deforming
pressure of domination. Reason is no more neutral or privileged than
technology — or consciousness. The instrumentality of the dominant or-
der imparts a particular direction, at a basic level, to consciousness itself.
In Foucault’s view, subjectivity is invented and defined by the ascendant
social institutions, to control us. Consciousness may be “a feeling about
domain-specific capacities that have accumulated over millions of years
of evolution,” as Michael Gazzaniga put it . 27 It is also an artifact of that
evolution, another marker of what has overtaken our species.

From Descartes to today, knowledge of the conscious subject seems
to have taken on ever-increasing importance as the necessary first step
in understanding. It is both the most intractable problem and the most
philosophically resonant problem before us. It was central for Kant,
though he erred in seeing consciousness as independent of any experi-
ence. Robert Brandom noted that “no Hegelian concept can be consid-
ered outside the economy of consciousness and self-consciousness .” 28 In
Hegel’s idealist system, however, actual consciousness barely counted.
Along these lines, Wilfred Sellars referred to him as “that great foe of
immediacy .” 29 Kierkegaard, the anti-Hegel, felt that Hegelianism made
us forget what it means to be a conscious self . 30 But for Schopenhauer,
awareness of our conscious self is torture; hence the goal is non-con-
sciousness, an aim shared by Buddhists. Bergson was more positive. He
defined consciousness as somehow a feeling of spontaneity.

Phenomenology (e.g. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) celebrates the vital-
ity and centrality of consciousness. Husserl described how the world is
constituted through acts of consciousness, emphasizing the inseparability
of perception and what is perceived, of consciousness from its objects. In-

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JOHN ZERZAN

tentionality is a key phenomenological term, meaning that consciousness
is always active, always a consciousness of something. Another important
phenomenological idea is that thinking must return to that which pre-
cedes it, to an originary, pre-conceptual presence or immediacy. This point
is anathema to post-structuralist/postmodern types, who assail the notion
that consciousness precedes the language used to describe it, and who
mount an assault on the central role of consciousness in general.

Kenan Malik refers to a “bizarre love-in” between postmodernists
and the neuroscientists who try to explain consciousness as a mechanism
and hope to achieve its computer simulation. But he also understands
that it isn’t so bizarre that both camps “end up in this virtual world,
because both abandoned the one thing that attaches all of us to real-
ity — our conscious selves .” 31 In a massively estranged world, it is also
unsurprising that resistance to mechanistic approaches, even the most
ghastly ones like transhumanism and cyborgism, is weakening. In fact, it
is loudly asserted that the strengthening technological context of society
is “rewiring” our consciousness to our detriment, at a basic level.

A relatively new entry is that of Roger Penrose, who proposes that
quantum mechanics, in the person of neuron particles called “microtu-
bules,” may unlock the puzzle of consciousness. The logic seems to be
that quantum physics is mysterious and consciousness is mysterious,
therefore they must connect with each other.

Generally speaking, neuroscience looks at the mind as a complex
computer or set of computational functions. The brain is of course the
focus, and this organ is examined in minutest detail, but what is left out
is what it feels like to possess a brain. A common assumption has been
that computers would at some point become conscious, by becoming
more complex and having greater capacity. But while we know why big-
ger mountains have snow and ice, we do not know why bigger brains
have consciousness. Nothing that has emerged in computer technology
(e.g. “Artificial Intelligence”) is remotely like consciousness, no sentient
device in sight. Neurophilosophy cannot give an account of conscious-
ness that in any way corresponds to ourselves and our conscious lives.
Returning full circle, as it were, how can we make a conscious machine
work when we don’t know what that would mean?

The nature of the relationship between the nervous system and con-
sciousness remains murky and much debated. A dominant thread is that

114 .

WHY HOPE?

it has something to do with information processing. Some of our science
heroes suggest that consciousness is indeed like information and that
therefore we might be able to store it. On a very similar wavelength, they
confuse machine computation with thinking and storage with memory.
They forget that logical operations may be executed without conscious-
ness — and seem to have nothing to do with it anyway!

Neural activity certainly bears on the shaping of consciousness and
to some degree various processes of consciousness can be localized or
located in the brain by cognitive neurobiology. The brain is obviously
a necessary condition of any type of consciousness, not only self-con-
sciousness, but nowhere is it shown to be a sufficient condition. Ray-
mond Tallis is an invaluable resource on the topic and here is a deli-
ciously pithy comment: “In so far as matter matters, the last word on its
mattering lies with the consciousness to whom it matters .” 32

There is another point of agreement between postmodernists and
neuroscientists (and a much larger number of people who are not aware
of the assumptions and implications involved). This is the idea that con-
sciousness is definitively representational. The postmodern tenet that
there is nothing outside representation is intimate with the mechanistic
identification of consciousness as symbolic processing, or representation-
al. Postmodernists and neuroscientists share a pedigree going back at least
as far as Socrates’ belief that consciousness was pictures in the soul. But
representation cannot precede self-awareness; it presupposes conscious-
ness, as Tallis points out . 33 Is consciousness possible without representa-
tion? The weakness of the doubt thus expressed can be dispelled in various
ways. For one thing, representation in the form of symbolic culture is a
recent development among humans, dated by most archaeologists to the
Upper Paleolithic. Thomas Wynn and others have deduced from archaeo-
logical evidence that humans were as intelligent as we are a million years
before even the first symbolic artifacts, let alone symbolic cultures . 34 Is it
at all likely, then, that they did not have consciousness?

It is more likely that representation diminishes consciousness. Oth-
er perspectives or dimensions are inhibited once the symbolic is estab-
lished. Immediacy is lost. The injury thus initiated is a commonplace of
philosophy, dating from ITegel if not earlier. And it is little wonder that
a distrust or unease about symbolic culture and its hold over us is al-
ways somewhere present. Lacan referred to a primary lack at the root of

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JOHN ZERZAN

consciousness, but the lack is representation itself. Nietzsche described
consciousness as a “disease” among Europeans, coming close perhaps to
naming culture as the cause . 35 Consciousness in the age of total repre-
sentation has to be more damaged still . 36

The idea that there are limits to our comprehension and that grasping
our own consciousness may be beyond those limits is not a novel one. It
seems to me that Colin McGinn has explained this very lucidly, in terms of
representation. In sum: “While consciousness is a nonspatial phenomenon,
human thought is fundamentally governed by spatial modes of represent-
ing the world .” 37 I think McGinn captured the possibly insoluble heart of
the challenge to comprehend consciousness. Like time, consciousness may
not be subject to representation . 38 Echoing St. Augustine’s meditations on
time almost word for word, Sir William Hamilton wrote two centuries ago:
“Consciousness cannot be defined; we may be ourselves fully aware of what
consciousness is, but we cannot without confusion convey to others a defi-
nition of what we ourselves clearly apprehend .” 39 Like time, consciousness
may be nothing in itself, but there any resemblance ends. For the former, as
an alienating, colonizing, dominating symbolic consciousness, is the bane
of the latter. The inner reality of consciousness is active and fertile. We exert
ourselves to plumb its full potential, to find what is preserved there, to find
new states, a sharper self-presence, even if at times we also seek to be less
than conscious.

Living under present conditions, our consciousness is haunted,
and still we desire the open and undivided consciousness of the child,
reminding us of what is almost a miracle, the polyphony of reality pre-
sented, not represented.

There is an often-told tale of a Pacific sailor who turns over his craft
to islanders on an overcast, stormy night, and then marvels at their suc-
cess at finding an island without so much as a compass.

When they arrived he asked, “How did you know that the island
was there?”

The Native crew replied, “It has always been there .” 40

116 .

WHY HOPE?

IENDNOTES)

1 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 3.

2 Ted Honderlich, ed., The Oxford Guide to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 160.

3 Raymond Tallis, On the Edge of Certainty: Philosophical Explorations (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1999), p. 36.

4 Colin Tudge, review of Rupert Sheldrakes The Science Delusion, in Resurgence, August

2012, p. 61.

5 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review LXXXIII (October

1974), pp. 435-450.

6 Norman Stuart Sutherland, The International Dictionary of Psychology (New York: Con-
tinuum, 1989), p. 90.

7 John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 247.

8 Ronald Chrisley, “A View from Anywhere,” in Paavo Pylkkanen and Tere Vaden, eds., Di-
mensions of Conscious Experience (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2001), p. 12.

9 Quoted in Barry Dainton, The Phenomenal Self (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), p. 40.

10 Quoted in Richard Zaner, The Context of Self (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,
1981), p. 89.

1 1 Colin McGinn, Mind and Bodies: Philosophers and Their Ideas (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997), p. 100.

1 2 Michael Frayn, The Human Touch (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 401.

1 3 Raymond Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 45.

14 Anna Hampstead Branch, “The Monk in the Kitchen,” in Conrad Aiken, ed., Twentieth-
Century American Poetry (New York: Modern Library, 1963), p. 42.

1 5 Quoted in Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal: A Defense of Human Consciousness (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 88.

1 6 Robert Bly, “The Cry Going out Over Pastures,” in Selected Poems (New York: Harper &
Row, 1986), p. 140.

1 7 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Nothing So Far,” in The Poems of Laura Riding (New York: Persea
Books, 1980), p. 318.

1 8 Kim Hill et al., “Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Social
Structure,” Science, March 2011.

1 9 Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1 957, especially pp. xviii, xxvi,
47, 231,387.

20 Tallis, op.cit., 1999, p. 188.

2 1 Roger Caras, A Perfect Harmony: The Intertwining Lives of Animals and Humans Throughout
History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 160.

22 Domesticated life has reduced us intellectually and emotionally at a genetic level, argues
Gerald R. Crabtree, “Our Fragile Intellect,” Trends in Genetics, 13 November 2012.

23 Discussed in Stephen A. Tyler, Mind, Meaning, and Culture (New York: Academic Press,
1978), p. 138.

24 Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar Gypsy,” in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 195.

25 Vincent Crapanzo, Imaginative Horizons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 68.

26 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 162.

27 Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Implication of Specialized Neuronal Circuits Versus Neuronal

117 .

JOHN ZERZAN

Number for Concepts Concerning the Nature of Human Conscious Experience,” in Gil-
bert Horman, ed., Conceptions of the Human Mind (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associ-
ates, 1993), p. 10.

28 Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), p. 78.

29 Quoted in ibid., p. 182.

30 Libus Lukas Miller, The Individual in the Theology of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlen-
berg Press, 1962), p. 32.

31 Kenan Malik, Man, Beast, and Zombie (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), p. 352.

32 Tallis, op.cit. 1999, p. 55.

33 Ibid., p. 121.

34 Especially Thomas Wynn, The Evolution of Spatial Competence (Urbana: University of Il-
linois Press, 1989).

35 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 300. 2012.

36 Lang Gore has considered lucid dreaming as evidently a gift of our earlier consciousness
as humans and a possible future capacity. To navigate between conscious and unconscious
zones is to be, he offers, outside representation and simultaneously creator, critic, and re-
cipient. Who needed — or would need — art? Personal correspondence, July 1, 2012.

37 McGinn, op.cit., p. 108.

38 My “Beginning of Time, End of Time,” in Elements of Refusal (Seattle: Left Bank Books,
1988) discussed resistance to objectified time in similar terms. We seem to have tried to
control or affect the growing materiality of time by spatializing or extending it in space,
which only enlarged the problem.

39 Quote in Evan Squires, Conscious Mind in the Physical World (New York: Adam Hilger,
1990), p. 144.

40 David Lewis, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island Navigators (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1978), p. 19.

118 .

The Sea

L ast remaining lair of unparalleled wildness. Too big to fail?

The whole world is being objectified, but Melville re-
minds us of all that remains. “There you stand, lost in the in-
finite series of the sea.” 1 What could be more tangible, more
of a contrast with being lost in the digital world, where we feel we can
never properly come to grips with anything.

Oceans are about time more than space, “as if there were a correla-
tion between going deep and going back.” 2 The Deep is solemn: link-
ing, in some way, all that has come before. Last things and first things.
“Heaven,” by comparison, is thin and faintly unserious.

“Over All the Face of Earth Main Ocean Flowed,” announced the
poem by John Milton. 3 Given its 71 percent predominance on this
planet, why is our world called Earth instead of Sea? Much of the land,
in fact, could be defined as littoral areas where land and sea meet. 4 The
sea is a textured place, infinite in its moods, forms, energies — and not so
easily de-textured. But we see what happens when culture is privileged
over place. The sea, where all life began just this side of four billion years
ago, must still sustain us. Not only are its waters the original source of
life, it also shapes the climate, weather, and temperature of the planet,
and therefore the status of terrestrial species.

Kant saw truth as akin to an island surrounded by a stormy sea; wa-
ter might “run wildly” and drown reason. 5 Chaos, disorder were always
to be feared and brought under control. In Milton’s paradise, the ocean
is chafing under restraint, 6 suggesting that it can yield truth when freed.
The power of nature is to be respected, not domesticated.

We come to life in water, in the amniotic fluid. Blood — and tears —
are salty like the sea, menstrual cycles like the tides of the maternal sea,
our mother. The sea is mountains rolling, sometimes calm and tem-
pered. For Swinburne, “the storm sounds only/More notes of more de-
light....” 7 So many qualities, even phosphorescent at times, as I have
seen on the Sea of Cortez. The seascape shows a magnificent array of
fluctuating aspects and energies. John Ruskin found therein “to all hu-
man minds the best emblem of unwearied unconquerable power, the
wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea.” 8

If the Earth is alive, the oceans are its most living parts. The sea
whispers, croons, bellows in its unnumbered moods, always the “ground
note of the planet’s undersong,” as George Sterling put it. 9 The very
pulse of the sea, not only its perpetual motion, has us imagining that it is
drawing breath. Inspirations and exhalations of a living, if unimaginably
vast animal; many have written of the sea as a fellow creature. Malcolm
Towry recorded this meditation: “Each drop into the sea is like a life,
1 thought, each producing a circle in the ocean, or the medium of life
itself, and widening into infinity.” 10

In the deep there is beauty and music; the sweeping surge of it is
a matchless strength, a tireless spirit of freedom. Writing in his journal
in 1952, Thomas Merton noted that every wave of the sea is free. 11 We
might seek a heart like the sea: ever open and at liberty.

Loren Eiseley decided that “if there is magic on this planet, it is
contained in water.” 12 Why does running water, even a fountain or an
aquarium, soothe or even heal? Far more potent, incomparable, is the
spell of the ocean. “I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea
as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else,” Joshua Slocum
revealed in his late nineteenth-century account, Sailing Alone Around
the WorldP For many, the sea demands a deep loyalty, prompted by
sheer wonder and the promise of peak experiences. A sense of being fully
animal and fully alive. Ocean-hearted? The sea’s staggering presence, its
pure openness, brings on very powerful sensations. Rimbaud perhaps
went furthest in trying to capture it in words:

I have recovered it.

What? Eternity.

It is the sea

Matched with the sun . 14

As the young Joyce evoked the sea: “The clouds were drifting above
him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him: and the
grey warm air was still: and a wild new life was singing in his veins. . ..
On and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to
the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.” 15
The sea, our deepest origin, calls to us. Sea-born, we are drawn
seaward. Alain Corbin, discussing the work of Adolphe de Custine, re-

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WHY HOPE?

counts the latter’s orientation toward that which “instinctively relates to

our origins ” Namely, that the “sight of the open sea. . .contributes to

the discovery of the deep inner self.” 16 There is an exalting and revelatory
experience possible in such a confrontation with the elements. We are
humbled at the shore, on the waves, our presence a question. “The com-
pleteness and certainty of nature makes life bearable, less anguished,” as
Richard Nelson has written. 17

When I was a small child at mid-century, our family sometimes
drove west about sixty miles to visit my Dad’s brother Ed on the central
Oregon coast. My brother and I competed to be the first to see the ocean
and cry “I see it!” It was a thrill to catch that first glimpse, every time.
About thirty years later I came back to Oregon from California and
worked in Newport at a shrimp cannery, near places called Boiler Bay
and Devil’s Punchbowl.

I don’t think it’s surprising that one can feel giddy at the massive sight.
The Pacific encompasses fully one-third of the globe, sixty-four million
square miles. Twice the size of the Adantic. The absolute, (anti-)monumen-
tal There of it.

Is it not true that we are all somehow called to the sea by its lure, per-
suasion, gravity? Until he was forty John Ruskin was drawn to have “merely
stared all day long at the tumbling and creaming strength of the sea.” 18 A
century later, Robert Frost wrote: “The people along the sand/ All turn and
look one way./They turn their back on the land./ They look at the sea all
day.” 19 Where every wave is different, and the heart and soul expand.

Toren Eiseley felt the Gulf of Mexico pulling him southward as he

lazed in the Platte River. And more than that: “I was water ” 20 In 1826

Heinrich Heine had expressed a similar union: “I love the sea as my
soul. Often, it even seems to me that the sea really is my soul.” 21 Swim-
ming in the ocean involves an “intimate immensity,” to borrow a term
from Gaston Bachelard. It connects with vastness and is inward, yet also
a vigorous and robust experience. There can be challenges and perils,
of course. Robert Louis Stevenson described a Hawai’ian woman who
swam for nine hours “in a high sea,” carrying the body of her husband
home. 22 Albert Camus confided, “I have always felt I lived on the high
seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.” 23

According to an article in the American Historical Review (2006),
the maritime dimension has become a subject in its own right. “No

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JOHN ZERZAN

longer outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history
of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.” 24 Unfor-
tunately, its arrival on the stage has occurred on the heels and in the
context of another inauguration, heralded by Gottfried Benn: “Now the
series of great insoluble disasters itself is beginning.” 25

The fate of the once freshening sea is now that of crashing fish num-
bers, accelerated loss of marine and coastal habitats on a global scale,
garbage gyres hundreds of miles across, dying coral reefs, growing dead
zones (e.g. hypoxic zones in the northern Gulf of Mexico), to cite a few
disastrous developments long in the making.

Water is “the most mythological of the elements,” wrote Charles
Kerenyi, 26 and the literature of the sea arguably began with Homer in
the early Iron Age, eighth-century B.P. He wrote of its lonely austerity,
“the sterile sea,” 27 a perspective that is certainly already that of civiliza-
tion, poised against the natural world. The sea was by now merely a
means, a passageway to increased domination, new conquests; large war
fleets were well established. Aphrodite, goddess of love, arose from sea
foam, but somehow failed to carry the day.

Seafaring is far older than history; it predates domestication/civili-
zation by hundreds of thousands of years. Humans were navigating the
oceans vastly earlier than we were riding horses, for instance. Homo erec-
tus, about 800,000 years ago, crossed scores of miles of ocean to inhabit
the island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago. 28

And even today, long voyages on the open sea are made by people
with no use for metals. David Lewis marveled at a Pacific native who
found his way “by means of a slight swell that probably had its origins
thousands of miles away.... He had made a perfect landfall in the half-
mile gap [between two islands], having navigated for between 45 and 48
miles without a single glimpse of the sky.” 29 Thor Heyerdahl of The Kon-
Tiki Expedition fame made use of the “Incas’ simple and ingenious way
of steering a raft” on his impressive South Pacific odyssey. 30 Interestingly,
while the Incas revered the sea, the Mayas made scant mention of it — pos-
sibly because the Mayas had a written language and the Incas did not.

Joshua Slocums account of his solo sail around the globe notes how
the South Pacific islanders “take what nature has provided for them,”
and “have great reason to love their country and fear the white man’s
yoke, for once harnessed to the plow their life would no longer be a

122 .

WHY HOPE?

poem.” 31 And his further South Pacific observation: “As I sailed further
from the center of civilization I heard less and less of what would and
what would not pay.” 32

Meanwhile, cannon-armed sailing ships had “heralded a funda-
mental advance in Europe’s place in the world” in terms of control of
oceanic trade routes. 33 In the late 1400s Portugal and Spain, the first
global naval powers, competed for vast stretches of the Atlantic, Indian,
and Pacific oceans. The worldwide commons of the seas was rather rap-
idly disenchanted and instrumentalized as the era of modern history
dawned. Its relative solitude, silence, spiritual wealth, and intimacy gave
way to the onslaught of globalization, and then industrial globalization.

The quiet gracefulness of sailing ships, and the seamanship skills of
their crews, were ushered out in the nineteenth century in favor of grace-
less vessels, noisy and forced, like moving factories. How much global-
ized industrial existence is possible under simple sail? Voyages with time
enough to know oceans and heavens, taking what wind and wave have
to offer. Adventures, not timetables and technological disasters.

A sentiment opposed to the Machine was the sea as archetype and
key source of the sublime in the Romantic era. The powerful sea paint-
ings of Winslow Homer and J.M.W. Turner certainly come to mind.
But celebrated or not, the oceans were being targeted for domestication.
In Cbilde Harold, Byron wrote: “Man marks the earth with ruin — his
control/Stops with the shore.” 34 Later in the century his words no longer
rang true. Joseph Conrad dated the end of the old sea from 1869, when
the Suez Canal was completed. 35 In 1912 an iceberg quickly dispatched
the largest moving object on the planet. Titanic’s demise was a blow to
confidence in the complete mastery of nature, as well as the opening act
of chronic contemporary disasters.

Peter Matthiessen’s novel Far Tortuga*’ is a troubled meditation on the
sea, with its background of a Caribbean region stripped of sea turtles, fish,
timber, etc. by the 1970s. In fact, John Steinbeck described Japanese fish-
ing dredges at work off the coast of Mexico in 1941, “literally scraping the
bottom clean” 37 with a ravening, wasteful industrial process. The assault on
the sea and its inhabitants is notliing new, but is always being intensified by
advancing technology. An IBM SmartCloud ad of 2012 boasts of “smarter”
computing systems that enable fishermen “to auction their catch while still
at sea,” 38 to speed up the decimation of the oceans.

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JOHN ZERZAN

Long ago we had few things, on the water especially. Now we take
our profusion of possessions with us. Mass society comes along on the
voyage of industrial tourism. “Voyage” comes from via: away. But there
is no more away. It is no coincidence that the survival struggles of in-
digenous peoples and aquatic life have reached a generally similar level
of extremity.

“All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.” But Ecclesi-
astes 1:7 is no longer accurate. Rising sea levels, perceptible since 1930,
are an alarming fact. “Other sea-cities have faltered,/ and striven with
the tide,/ other sea-cities have struggled/ and died,” observed H.D. 39
Trillions of tons of water are now a steady flow of polar ice cap melting.

Many studies and new books recount what is starkly clear. Ris-
ing temperatures, acidification levels and pollution; the North Sea has
warmed to the point of tropical fish and birds in the fjords of Norway.
The thermohaline circulation (vertical current movement) in the North
Atlantic is weakening markedly.

Damaged, clearly, but not domesticated yet. A couple of lines from
two anonymous poets: indicating the ocean, “Give me fields that no
man plows/ The farm that pays no fee,” and “The ocean’s fields are fair
and free,/ There are no rent days on the sea!” 40 To watch a fine surf for
hours, to recall direct sensory experience — and ponder its severe dimi-
nution. Many have called the sea the finest university of life, free from
the never-satisfied network of speech and the symbolic. Paul Valery felt
that “the quickening sea / Gives back my soul. . .O salty potency!/ I’ll run
to the wave and from it be reborn!” 41

There is a kind of purification motif that many writers have touched on
vis-a-vis the sea. Rimbaud, for example, referred to the sea “which I loved as
though it should cleanse me of a stain.” 42 Jack Kerouac’s first novel mentions
“the way this Protean ocean extended its cleansing forces up, down, and in a
cyclorama to all directions.” 43 The once-scrubbed seas, soaking up the crime
of civilization. John Steinbeck saw that “a breakwater is usually a dirty place,
as though tampering with the shoreline is obscene and impractical to the
cleansing action of the sea.” 44 For Heyerdahl, the Pacific “had washed and
cleansed both body and soul,” 45 echoing Euripedes’ words: “The sea washes
away and cleanses every human stain.” 46

Its own denizens show us so very much. The porpoises, that always
prefer sailboats; the singing humpback whales; dolphins, with their ex-

124 .

WHY HOPE?

traordinary brain size and intelligence. Did not whales and dolphins re-
turn to the oceans, having found land life unsatisfactory? There is some
kind of open telepathic connection among all dolphins in the sea, ac-
cording to Wade Doak. 47

“I will go back to the great sweet mother,/ Mother and love of men,
the sea,” wrote Swinburne. 48 The sea has many voices. “Deep calleth unto
deep,” to quote Psalms 52:7. All of life is connected, and the “oceanic
feeling” aptly expresses a sense of deep bonds, a oneness. Not acciden-
tally is “oceanic” the term employed to denote a profound connectedness.
Robinson Jeffers told us that “mere use,” meaning the technological, the
fabricated world, “won’t cover up the glory.” 49 The glory of the sea, the
glory of the non-fabricated world. He celebrated the wholeness of life and
the universe, counseling “Tove that, not man / Apart from that.” 50 Also
remember, from the “French May” of 1968, “Sous les paves, la plage.”

On his Inca-inspired raft, Thor Heyerdahl discovered a deep truth.
“Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance.
We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had
been full for men before the technical age also — indeed, fuller and richer
in many ways than the life of modern man.” 51

And we still have the sea, just possibly too big to fail. “Cease not
your moaning you fierce old mother,” wrote Walt Whitman, 52 whose
truest poetry so often evoked the sea. Tet’s join with Byron: “Roll on,
thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!” 53

(ENDNOTES)

1 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale (New York: Random House, 1930), p. 223.

2 James Hamilton Patterson, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds (New York: Random
House, 1992), p. 92.

3 John Milton, “Over all the Face of Earth Main Ocean Flowed,” in The Eternal Sea : An An-
thology of Sea Poetry, W.M. Williamson, ed. (New York: Coward McCann, 1946), p. 187.

4 Paul Rainbird, The Archaeology of Islands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.
48.

5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.
665.

6 “Under yon boiling ocean, wrapped in chains,” for instance. John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Second Edition, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), Book II, p. 38.

7 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “To a Seamew,” in Williamson, op.cit., pp. 276—277.

8 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3 (London: George Allen, 1903), p. 494.

9 George Sterling, “Sonnets on the Sea’s Voice,” in Williamson, op.cit., pp. 510—51 1.

1 0 Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends: fictions, poems, fragments, letters, Michael Hof-

125 .

JOHN ZERZAN

mann, ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), p. 239.

1 1 Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), pp. 474—475.

12 Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 15.

1 3 Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (New York: Sheridan House, 1954), p. 4.

1 4 Arthur Rimbaud, “Eternity,” translated by Francis Golffing, in The Anchor Anthology of
French Poetry From Nerval to Valery in English Translation, ed. Angel Flores (New York:
Anchor Books, 2000), p. 120.

1 5 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), p. 144.

1 6 Adolphe de Custine, cited in Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in
the Western World, translated by Jocelyn Phelps (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1994), p. 170.

17 Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. 129.

18 John Ruskin, Praeterita (Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1885), p. 68.

1 9 Robert Frost, “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep,” Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 394.

20 Eiseley, op.cit., p. 19.

21 Heinrich Heine, cited in Corbin, op.cit., p. 168.

22 Robert Louis Stevenson, Island Landfalls: Selections from the South Seas (Edinburgh: Can-
nongate, 1987), p. 69.

23 Albert Camus, “The Sea Close By,” Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, translated
by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 181.

24 Karen Wigen, “Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 1 1 1:3 (June 2006), p. 717.

25 Gottfried Benn, cited in Ulrich Beck, World Global Society (Malden, MA: Polity Press,
1999), p. 108.

26 Charles Kerenyi, cited in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, translated by Daniel
Russell (New York: Orion Press, 1969), p. 177.

27 Homer, cited in Jules Michelet, La Mer, translation by Alice Parman (Paris: Gallimard,
1983), pp. 269-270.

28 Morwood et al., 1999, cited in Rainbird, op.cit., p. 65.

29 David Lewis, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island Navigators (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1978), p. 14.

30 Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1950), p. 84.

31 Slocum, op.cit., p. 158.

32 Ibid., p. 157.

33 Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), p. 103.

34 George Gordon, Lord Byron, cited in W.H. Auden, The Enchafid Flood, or The Romantic
Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 16.

35 Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923), begin-
ning of Chapter 2.

36 Peter Mattheissen, Far Tortuga (New York: Random House, 1975).

37 John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 204.

38 “Smarter business for a Smarter Planet: The cloud that’s transforming an industry, one fish
at a time.” IBM, 2012.

39 H.D., “Other Sea-Cities,” H.D.: Collected Poems 1912 — 1941 , ed. Louis L. Martz (New
York: New Directions, 1983), p. 359.

40 Anon., “We’ll Go to Sea No More” and “The Fisher’s Life,” in Williamson, op.cit., pp. 309, 310.

41 Paul Valery, “The Cemetery by the Sea,” in Flores, op.cit., p. 276.

126 .

WHY HOPE?

Arthur Rimbaud, “The Alchemy of Words,” in Flores, op.cit., pp 127—128.

Jack Kerouac, The Sea is My Brother (Boston: Da Capo Press, 201 1), p. 206.

Steinbeck, op.cit ., p. 17.

Heyerdahl, op.cit ., p. 97.

Corbin, op.cit ., p. 67.

Wade Doak, Dolphin Dolphin (New York: Sheridan House, 1981).

Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Return,” in Williamson, op.cit ., p. 18.

Robinson Jeffers, “Fierce Music,” The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (New York:
Random House, 1963), p. 57.

Robinson Jeffers, “The Answer,” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (New York: Random
House, 1938), pp 57, 594.

Heyerdahl, op.cit ., pp. 132.

Walt Whitman, “Sea-Drift,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1921), p. 205.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto Fourth, The Complete
Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 179.

127 .

What Does it Mean
to he Healthy?

W hat does it mean to be healthy, when dis-ease is the fact of
modem life? As we know, there’s no separating body and
spirit, and here the main emphasis will be on the spirit.
Paraphrasing Adorno, Fabian Freyenhagen offered
this judgment: “In a wrong world, no one can be healthy, live well or
even rightly.” 1 But if, amid the ruins, a wrong world consigns us to liv-
ing wrong lives, at least we can resist our social world in both private
and public spheres, and thus live less wrongly. The great impediment,
of course, is that we really only attend to the private sphere. Billions are
spent on various flavors of self-empowerment rhetoric, and the failure of
this effort could not be more evident. If any of it worked, there wouldn’t
be such a constant flood of “self-help” commodities and focus on sup-
posed therapeutic expertise.

The wrong world. The world of accumulated suffering and trauma. 2
“The Age of School Shootings;” 3 rising rates of suicide, 4 autism, 5 and
obesity; the extinction of community. Widespread anxiety 6 and a kind of
overall PTSD condition — and all so generally unthought, unexamined.

A passivity and a sense of doom have settled on modern industrial
society, as we lose our connection to each other and the world. 1 noticed
in the early 1980s that Gary Trudeau’s comic strip characters began to
have dark bags under their eyes. Not too much later, today’s fashion
models’ expressions are blank and/or sullen. Smiles are very rare. As
Philip Larkin’s poem “Afternoons” concludes:

Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives . 7

Zygmunt Bauman goes so far as to assert that “we have indeed be-
come, at least for the time being, ‘invalids watching from hospital win-
dows’.” 8 We can at least identify with Dalton Conley’s query, “What has
happened to leave so many of us dangling in uncertainty each morning
as we rise from our beds . . . ?” 9 Strength and health are not about staying

WHY HOPE?

where one is or regaining that stasis. If there could be a kind of psycho-
analysis of today’s culture, Adorno decided, it would “show the sickness
proper to the time to consist precisely in normality.” 10

High-tech consumerism and the market feed on the unhappiness and
withdrawal from life they generate. There is a fragmenting, assaultive, and
numbing quality to contemporary developed societies that injures human
interiority deeply. Norman Mailer saw cancer as a result of the wrong world
internalized. The madness is imprisoned within, goes into the tissues and
cells and causes a tension that results in a mad “revolt of the cells.” 1 1 This for-
mulation seems plausible to me. Hie aggregate of pollutants certainly bears
on the case of cancer, but so, too, does the force of massive estrangement.

The prevailing and invasive madness is a culture of nihilism, with
such features as depression, 12 distrust, 13 loneliness, 14 and fear. 15 A restless
inner emptiness is characteristic, especially since the 1970s. The ma-
nipulation or control of emotional life is a goal everywhere advertised,
but it is not working; it’s clearly incapable of producing joy or health.
Franz Kafka captured the image of the victim “caught in the trap the
world has turned into,” as Milan Kundera put it. 16 Graduates are still
being told, echoing Shakespeare’s Polonius, “to thine own self be true”;
but who thinks this relates to the world we endure?

How can we “feel and engage rather than become numbed and
dulled by how much we face,” in Sarah Conn’s words. 17 At the same
time, judging from the rise in mass “random” shootings, there are more
“walking time bombs” out there. Lipovesky and Charles (among others)
note “a worrying trend towards a greater fragility and emotional insta-
bility” among individuals. 18

The meaning of health, the recovery of the art of healing, is to
learn from our suffering, to see its sources. Ward Churchill, asked why
he doesn’t speak about healing, replied that there’s no healing unless we
stop the wounding. 19

In the Journal of Affective Disorders, Brandon Hidaka discussed “De-
pression as a Disease of Modernity,” contrasting past human environments
with modern living. 20 He saw present-day “overfed, malnourished, seden-
tary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, and socially isolated” 21 denizens
of disenchanted, dysfunctional, domesticated mass society as inherently
prone to ill health. A brief look at some features of its opposite, hunter-
gatherer life, will throw this even more clearly into relief.

129 .

JOHN ZERZAN

At one time, and for a very long time, we lived literally close to our
mother Earth. Relatively recently, our beds — especially in the West —
have risen, as have our tables. Just lately, with ever more sedentism, we
learn that a lot of sitting on chairs can be fatal! 22

Roland Barthes referred to our divorce from the Earth in his “Civi-
lization of the Rectangle” remarks, pointing out a kind of “pollution
effected by the rectangle, which very rarely occurs in nature.” 23 Land
ownership, a function of domestication, is the firm basis of the separa-
tion of humans from the natural world. Landed property is the origi-
nal enclosure of reproductive resources, the control of both land and
women. Along these lines, the privatized domestic sphere is also the
invention of domestic violence. 24

There were choices thousands of generations earlier than these de-
velopments, based on an intelligence equal to ours. Paul Tacon is on
good grounds to surmise that very early humans (e.g. Homo erectus)
probably “questioned their position in the universe.” 25 They were far
more robust than we are, and recent scholarship has significantly raised
estimates of their longevity. Research has also confirmed very early cook-
ing with fire: the appearance of small molars at 1.9 million years ago
is evidence of cooked food, compared with the large molars of other
primates who spend much more time chewing. 26 And it may not be
amiss to bring in Montaigne’s sixteenth-century essay, Of the Custom of
Wearing Clothes, 17 where he observes that people remain who wear none,
“situated under much the same sky as ours [France’s]. Montaigne found
it unhealthy, our practice of being so mediated against the elements,
when we “are naturally equipped with sufficient covering. . ,.” 28

Capabilities such as attention span, literacy, and depth of thinking
are aspects of health. Too bad they’re being fast washed away by the all-
encompassing momentum of technology. In March 2014 the Scholastic
Aptitude Test for high schoolers was dumbed down, excising the once
required essay portion and deleting words thought too difficult in to-
day’s tweet and text world. In the lower grades the teaching of handwrit-
ing is being discontinued. That skill and aesthetic is no longer wanted
for a life spent at keyboards, staring at screens.

We are told that we’re empowered by all the technology, that it puts
us in charge, but in fact we’re swept along by it. We are free-floating sub-
jects, more and more “bereft of any psychological traits or sociocultural

130 .

WHY HOPE?

specificity,” according to Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton. 29
And we are increasingly reliant on technological prosthesis for compan-
ionship, entertainment, and so much else. Early on, Jean Baudrillard
called this “the end of interiority and intimacy.” 30

Milan Kundera once described the terrible elusiveness of living in
the present moment: “All the sadness of life lies in that fact,” he judged. 31
How much does technology rob us of well-being by chasing us from
the present, from being present in the moment? In fact, its accelerating
movement into every sphere means that all experience is decreasingly
real. Vital, first-hand experience is in full retreat. Human relations have
been traded for relations via machines. A 2014 news story reported that
traditional dances and proms at John Jay High School in Cross River,
New York, ended in 2011. 32 They were discontinued because students
overwhelmingly preferred going home to text and tweet rather than at-
tend dances. 33 The digital dimension has become the destination for
more of everything people do. Even as cyber culture becomes ever thin-
ner and more homogeneous, distracted, and superficial. William Powers
refers to “the rushed, careless quality of screen communication,” 34 and
John David Ebert adds that “Facebook does not allow for the possibility
of long conversations of any kind.” 35

Can there exist a healthy autonomy from this pervasive and inva-
sive medium? Considering the entire ensemble, how much free choice is
there, given what is now required of us on an everyday functional level?
We are personally diminished by our progressive de-skilling, which re-
duces our autonomy further, while elevating our dependence on special-
ists of all kinds.

There is a profound dissonance between our inner nature and the
always-intruding technological environment. A disembodied, synthetic
life-world means that we live less vigorously. Nietzsche saw plenitude
as the key to health. Where is real plenty in the virtual? To be healthy
means to live richly, challenging ourselves, becoming strong by stretch-
ing ourselves past accepted norms.

And who would deny that health has to do with love? Which is a
way of seeing the world, or not seeing it. Nothing grounds and supports
us more than love. Whatever warmth we share is our small splendor. In
“An Arundel Tomb,” Philip Larkin concluded, “What will survive of us
is love.” 36

131 .

JOHN ZERZAN

We also know that health, at base, only really exists within a just
and humane society. It is healthful to resist unprecedented alienation
and unfreedom. The alternative is not a healthy one.

We settle for so little as disaster closes in. We pretend that what
forecloses our flourishing, impinges on how we could be healthy, isn’t
somehow, oppressively, everywhere. What a howl — and more — could
burst forth from the yawning want that constitutes our lives. Health!

(ENDNOTES)

1 Fabien Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Life Less Wrongly (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5.

2 When what is taken for granted can no longer be assumed to exist, a generalized, traumatic
anxiety results. Jeffrey Kauffman, ed., Loss of the Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic
Loss (New York: Brunner- Routledge, 2002).

3 Jack Flealy, “The Age of School Shootings,” New York Times, January 16, 2014.

4 David Brooks, “The Irony of Despair,” New York Times, December 6, 2013. “Walter Ben-
jamin said of modernity that it was born under the side of suicide,” Zygmunt Bauman,
Postmodernism and its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 12.

5 Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2013). “The dramatic rise in autism spectrum disorders,” p. 203.

6 Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub-
lishers Inc., 1999). The current culture is “drenched with anxiety,” p. 25.

7 Philip Larkin, “Afternoon,” in Collected Poems (New York: The Noonday Press, 1989), p. 121.

8 Bauman, op.cit., p. 156.

9 Dalton Conley, Elsewhere, U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), p. 9.

1 0 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 1 974),
Thesis 36, p. 58.

1 1 Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: The Dial Press, 1965), p. 13.

1 2 Lennard J . Davis, The End of Normal (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013).
“Depression rates rise each year rather than diminish,” p. 53.

1 3 Connie Cass, “In God We Trust, Maybe, But Not in Each Other,” Associated Press, No-
vember 30, 2013.

14 Ami Rokach, ed., Loneliness Updated (New York: Routledge, 2013).

1 5 Michael A. Weinstein, Structure of Human Life: A Vitalist Ontology (New York: New York
University Press, 1979). “The overwhelming motive that grounds our practical life is the
desire to ward off fear,” p. 53.

1 6 Quoted in Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, translated by Mark A. Ritter (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 88.

1 7 Quoted in Fisher, op.cit., p. 15.

1 8 Gilles Lipovetsky with Sebastien Charles, Hyper-Modern Times (New York: Polity, 2005),
p. 85.

19 Ward Churchill, public talk, Eugene, Oregon. June 18, 2000.

20 Brandon H. Hidaka, “Depression as a Disease of Modernity: Explanations for Increased
Prevalence,” Journal of Affective Disorders 140:3 (November 2012).

21 Ibid., p. 205.

132 .

WHY HOPE?

Alexandra Sifferlin, “Why Prolonged Sitting is Bad for Your Health,” TIME, March 28,
2012. Many other studies and articles underlined this in 2012 and 2013.

Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the College
de France (1976—1977) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 1 14.

Victor Buchli, “Households and ‘Home Cultures’” in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry,
eds., Material Culture Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 302.

Paul S.C. Ta^on, “Identifying Ancient Religious Thought and Iconography,” in Colin Ren-
frew and Iain Morley, eds., Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiri-
tual Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 70.

See my “The Way We Used to Be,” in Future Primitive Revisited (Port Townsend, WA: Feral
House, 2012), p. 113.

Organ, Nunn, et ah, “Phylogenetic Shifts in Feeding Time during Evolution of Homo,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108: 33 (August 30, 2011).

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1958), pp. 166-169.

Ibid . , p. 167.

Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton: Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Inter-
net (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 139.

Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 133.

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York.: Grove Press, 1988), p. 25.

Carolyn Moss, “My High School No Longer Holds Dances Because Students Would Rath-
er Stay Home and Text Each Other,” Business Insider, March 10, 2014.

William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 53.

John David Ebert, The New Media Invasion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
2011), p. 59.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 46.

133 .

Why Hope?

I t’s pretty fashionable, among anarchists as well, to sneer at the
notion of hope, to explicitly rule out any chance of overall victory
over domination and oppression. Desert (2011) sports this out-
look on its cover: “In our hearts we all know the world will not be
‘saved’,” and repeats this statement twice more in its opening pages.
Civilization will persist. It’s time to give up on “unwinnable bat-
tles.” In this way the misery of burnout and disillusionment will be
avoided and we’ll all be a lot happier (!) The Mexican Unabomber-
type group, Individualidades Teniendo a lo Salvaje (ITS), also firmly
asserts that there’ll be no winning. “We do not believe this is possible,”
they proclaim repeatedly.

But it is possible. Our overcoming the disease of civiliza-
tion is in no way guaranteed, obviously, but clearly it is possible. I
prefer what Kierkegaard said of hope: It is “the passion for the pos-
sible.” More boldly, whatever became of “Demand the Impossible”?
When victory is refused are we not at Game Over?

We might recall Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which an-
nounced the apparent end of radical possibilities, the definitive triumph
of consumerist unfreedom. He was delighted to have been proven wrong
within weeks of the book’s 1 964 appearance by the beginnings of a global
movement that shook the world. And as the global system now shows
itself to be failing at every level, shows itself to have no answers at all, there
stands every chance of qualitatively surpassing the Movement of the ’60s.
But not, needless to say, if we renounce any hope of overcoming. It is
well-known that health and recovery from illness is tied not to hope-
lessness but its opposite. Consider the Serbian Danilo Kis’ last nov-
el, Psalm 44, about a young family’s will to survive and resist in Aus-
chwitz, where visualizing hope is a “necessity.” For us and all life, mat-
ters are grave but we are not in Auschwitz. And yet we spurn hope?
Egoism and nihilism are evidently in vogue among anarchists and I’m
hoping that those who so identify are not without hope. Illusions no,

WHY HOPE?

hope yes. I wonder what we have to offer at large, in terms of, say, analysis
and inspiration — or whether that’s still being asked much.

There are egoists who seem mainly in love with their sacred Egos,
where all is judged insofar as it serves the Self. Meanwhile the reigning
techno-culture feeds solipsism, narcissism, and isolation the more tech-
no-addicted are its subjects. Did Max Stirner see the natural world as
having value only in relation to one’s ego? How much interest does the
pure egoist have in mutual aid, social struggles or the disappearance of
community? I recommend Stirner’s The Ego and its Own as an important
corrective to the appeals of collectivism in its various guises, but tend to
agree with Arizona anarchist Dan Todd that Diogenes and the Cynics
in the West and Chuang-Tzu and some of the Taoists in the East did an
even better job of it centuries earlier.

Does nihilism mean that pretty much everything must go for a
decent life to be possible? If so then I’m a nihilist. It’s safe to say that
nihil-ism isn’t literally nothing-ism or one couldn’t be both a nihilist and
an anarchist. If it means the politics of desperation or hopelessness, no
thanks. French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard put the word in a dif-
ferent light: “With the megalopolis, what the West realizes and diffuses
is its nihilism. It is called development.” Are there nihilists who take on
such institutions and what drives them?

There’s more than anti-hope on offer, in any case. Two new books
remind us of that. Enrico Manicardi’s Free from Civilization is the first
A-Z’ type anti-civ offering in any language (originally Liberi dalla
Civilta ) and Paul Cedenec’s The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re
Meant to Be, the least pessimistic book I can recall reading. It refers to
German anarchist Gustav Landauer, for instance, for the idea that we
“need not worry that the quantity of those answering the call will not
be great enough, when the quality of its [anti-civ] content is beyond
question.” It brings anarchist resistance and the spirit together in a very
wide-ranging and powerful contribution.

Dire times but, as Oscar Wilde had it, “We are all in the gutter but
some of us are looking at the stars.”

135 .

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